Post-Prognostics Decision for Optimizing the Commitment of Fuel Cell Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a decision-making strategy to extend the operational life of multi-stack fuel cell systems by optimizing each stack's contribution, using a novel algorithm to handle large-scale problems efficiently.

Contribution

It introduces a new commitment strategy and a relaxed problem formulation for fuel cell management, employing the Mirror Prox algorithm for improved computational efficiency.

Findings

The proposed approach outperforms simple projection methods in computational experiments.

The relaxed problem formulation enables handling large-scale fuel cell system instances.

The strategy effectively prolongs the useful life of fuel cell platforms under service constraints.

Abstract

In a post-prognostics decision context, this paper addresses the problem of maximizing the useful life of a platform composed of several parallel machines under service constraint. Application on multi-stack fuel cell systems is considered. In order to propose a solution to the insufficient durability of fuel cells, the purpose is to define a commitment strategy by determining at each time the contribution of each fuel cell stack to the global output so as to satisfy the demand as long as possible. A relaxed version of the problem is introduced, which makes it potentially solvable for very large instances. Results based on computational experiments illustrate the efficiency of the new approach, based on the Mirror Prox algorithm, when compared with a simple method of successive projections onto the constraint sets associated with the problem.