A post-prognostics decision approach to optimize the commitment of fuel cell systems in stationary applications

The use of fuel cells appears to be of growing interest as a potential alternative to conventional power systems. Fuel cell systems suffer however from insufficient durability and their lifetime may be improved. Prognostics results in the form of Remaining Useful Life are proposed to be used in a Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) framework to maximize the global useful life of a multi-stack fuel cell system under service constraint. Convex optimization is used to define the contribution of each stack to a global needed power output. A Mirror-Prox for Saddle Points method is proposed to cope with the assignment problem. Resolution method is detailed and promising simulation results are provided.