Early Remaining Useful Life Prediction for Lithium-Ion Batteries Using a Gaussian Process Regression Model Based on Degradation Pattern Recognition

Lithium-ion batteries experience nonlinear degradation characteristics during long-term operation. Accurate estimation of their remaining useful life (RUL) is of significant importance for early fault diagnosis and residual value evaluation. However, existing RUL prediction approaches often suffer from limited accuracy and insufficient specificity. To address these limitations, this study proposes an RUL prediction methodology based on Gaussian process regression, which incorporates degradation pattern recognition and auxiliary features derived from knee points. First, 9 health-related features are extracted from the first 100 charge/discharge cycles of the battery. Based on these extracted features, clustering and classification techniques are employed to categorize the batteries into three distinct degradation patterns. Moreover, feature importance is assessed to identify and eliminate redundant indicators, thereby enhancing the relevance of the feature set for prediction. Subsequently, for each degradation pattern, GPR-based models with composite kernel functions are constructed by integrating knee point positions and their corresponding slopes. The model hyperparameters are further optimized through the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to improve the adaptability and generalization capability of the predictive models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a high level of predictive accuracy, with an overall mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of approximately 8.70%. Furthermore, compared with conventional prediction methods, the proposed approach exhibits superior performance and can serve as an effective evaluation tool for diverse application scenarios, including lithium-ion battery health monitoring, early prognostics, and echelon utilization.