Benchmarking and Analysis of Smart Battery Pack Architectures

The increasing penetration of renewable energy sources has intensified the demand for new topologies of battery energy storage systems. Smart batteries, which integrate a dedicated power converter in each module, provide flexibility, enhanced safety, and extended lifetime, but require more sophisticated battery management system strategies. This paper compares centralized and main-local BMS architectures applied to smart batteries, focusing on battery pack output voltage regulation, module coordination, and state-of-charge (SOC) balancing. Simulation and controller-hardware-in-the-loop experiments demonstrate that the centralized BMS delivers faster and synchronized operation, maintaining stable output voltage without overvoltage events. The main-local BMS, while more modular and scalable, exhibits voltage overshoots due to communication delays. Nevertheless, both approaches exhibited similar SOC equalization times, indicating that SOC dynamics are relatively insensitive to latency. These results highlight the trade-offs between dynamic performance, scalability, and safety, while also emphasizing the role of smart batteries in extending system lifetime. The findings provide guidelines for selecting the appropriate architecture according to system size and requirements.