Researchers from the University of Oxford, led by Jingbo Qu and Yijie Wang, have developed a new approach to improve the operation and maintenance of large-scale Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs). These systems are crucial for maintaining power-system stability, but their management often relies on reactive, expert-dependent diagnostics. The team’s work aims to transform routine monitoring data into practical, actionable insights, enhancing the reliability and safety of energy storage systems.
The researchers introduce an inconsistency-driven operation and maintenance paradigm for BESSs. This framework systematically evaluates multi-dimensional inconsistencies—such as electrical, thermal, and aging-related variations—within battery cells. By integrating these evaluations with large language model-based semantic reasoning, the framework bridges the gap between quantitative diagnostics and practical maintenance decisions. The team demonstrated the effectiveness of their approach using eight months of field data from an in-service battery system comprising 3,564 cells. They showed how inconsistencies can be distilled into structured operational records and converted into actionable maintenance insights through a multi-agent framework.
The proposed approach enables accurate and explainable responses to real-world operation and maintenance queries. According to the researchers, it reduces response time and operational cost by over 80% compared with conventional expert-driven practices. This significant improvement highlights the potential for intelligent operation and maintenance of BESSs, with direct implications for the reliability, safety, and cost-effective integration of energy storage into modern power systems.
The research was published in the journal Nature Energy, underscoring its importance and relevance to the energy sector. By providing a scalable and interpretable decision-support framework, this work paves the way for more efficient and effective management of battery energy storage systems, ultimately supporting the broader adoption of renewable energy sources and enhancing grid stability.
This article is based on research available at arXiv.