This review provides an overview of new strategies to address the current challenges of automotive battery systems: Intelligent Battery Systems. They have the potential to make battery systems more performant and future-proof for coming generations of electric vehicles. The essential features of Intelligent Battery Systems are the accurate and robust determination of cell individual states and the ability to control the current of each cell by reconfiguration. They enable high-level functions like fault diagnostics, multi-objective balancing strategies, multilevel inverters, and hybrid energy storage systems. State of the art and recent advances in these topics are compiled and critically discussed in this article. A comprising, critical discussion of the implementation aspects of Intelligent Battery Systems complements the review. We touch on sensing, battery topologies and management, switching elements, communication architecture, and impact on the single-cell. This review contributes to transferring the best technologies from research to product development.

In this article, a promising design of power electronics in the field of battery electric vehicles is proposed. The presented parallel enhanced commutation integrated nested multilevel inverter is a symmetrical cascaded multilevel inverter characterized by a minimal number of semiconductor switches compared to its range of functions. In addition to regular four-quadrant operation, the topology is able to reconfigure individual battery cells between serial and parallel interconnection to minimize the internal resistance of the reconfigurable battery system during operation. In particular, by separately considering the internal resistance of the power electronics and the variable internal resistance of the reconfigurable battery, a minimum overall internal resistance is achieved. After a detailed review of related modern topologies, the topology’s inherent structural advantages are presented. Functional spectrum, internal resistance, and efficiency behavior are compared with related topologies frequently studied in the literature. Measurements on a 17-level three-phase prototype show the function and performance of the proposed structure in terms of functional spectrum, low total harmonic distortion, and efficiency. It turns out that the parallel enhanced commutation integrated nested multilevel inverter is a competitive topology that should be investigated further.