Maximizing System Lifetime by Battery Scheduling

The use of mobile devices is limited by the battery life-time. Some devices have the option to connect an extra bat-tery, or to use smart battery-packs with multiple cells to ex-tend the lifetime. In these cases, scheduling the batteries over the load to exploit recovery properties usually extends the system lifetime. Straightforward scheduling schemes, like round robin or choosing the best battery available, al-ready provide a big improvement compared to a sequential discharge of the batteries. In this paper we compare these scheduling schemes with the optimal scheduling scheme produced with a priced-timed automaton battery model (im-plemented and evaluated in Uppaal Cora). We see that in some cases the results of the simple scheduling schemes are close to optimal. However, the optimal schedules also clearly show that there is still room for improving the bat-tery lifetimes