Remaining Battery Lifetime Determination in Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are characterized by an intensive interaction between its electro-mechanical devices and the embedded computer system. In such systems, having knowledge of the battery lifetime is crucial, since power failures can render the system inoperable. In order to help systems designers to handle such issue, this paper presents an approach that aims to monitor the system energy consumption and to estimate its battery lifetime. The developed approach is based on the characterization of the external peripherals of the CPS, which are correlated with the operational modes of the embedded software. The novelty of this proposal is the capacity to express the energy consumption by using a mathematical model, without needing additional instruments, electronics or transducers. To illustrate the proposed solution we designed a prototype test bench. Obtained results indicate that the model gives an accurate estimation for the battery lifetime compared to solutions based on the system instrumentation. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.