Cluster-Based Prediction for Batteries in Data Centers

Abstract

Prediction of a battery’s health in data centers plays a significant role in Battery Management Systems (BMS). Data centers use thousands of batteries, and their lifespan ultimately decreases over time. Predicting battery’s degradation status is very critical, even before the first failure is encountered during its discharge cycle, which also turns out to be a very difficult task in real life. Therefore, a framework to improve Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) accuracy for forecasting battery’s health with clustered predictors is proposed. Clustering approaches, such as Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) or k-shape-based, are beneficial to find patterns in data sets with multiple time series. The aspect of large number of batteries in a data center is used to cluster the voltage patterns, which are further utilized to improve the accuracy of the ARIMA model. Our proposed work shows that the forecasting accuracy of the ARIMA model is significantly improved by applying the results of the clustered predictor for batteries in a real data center. This paper presents the actual historical data of 40 batteries of the large-scale data center for one whole year to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

1. Introduction

Uninterrupted power source (UPS) batteries are an integral part of any data center, which ensure the stable performance of the data center during transitional fail-over mechanisms between power grids and diesel generators [1]. Data centers require steady power for smooth performance, which is thus managed by the UPS batteries. UPS is installed between the main power grid and the servers [2]. Since the electricity bill of a data center constitutes a significant portion of its overall operational costs, data centers are now major consumers of electrical energy [3]. In 2013, data centers in U.S.A. consumed 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and this was expected to continue to rise over the years [4]. In 2017, nearly 8 million data centers required an astronomical 416.2 terawatt-hours of electricity [5,6]. Even a single faulty battery in a pack could cause millions of dollars of damage to the equipment used in the data centers during transition. The layout of the data center’s design is illustrated in Figure 1.

Despite the increasing improvements in battery manufacturing and storage technology [7], health estimation of batteries in data centers is still a challenge. Not surprisingly, many studies have been conducted to develop battery life prediction of the battery packs, such as voltage fault diagnosis, charge regimes, and state of health (SOH) estimation. Severson et al. [8] demonstrated a data-driven model to predict the battery life cycle with voltage curves of 124 batteries before degradation. Tang et al. [9] predicted the battery voltage with the model-based extreme learning machine for electric vehicles. L. Jiang et al. [10] employed the Taguchi method to search an optimal charging pattern for 5-stage constant-current charging strategy and improved the lithium-ion battery charging efficiency by 0.6–0.9%. D. Sidorov et al. [11] presented a review of battery energy storage and an example of battery modeling for renewable energy applications and demonstrated an adaptive approach to solve the load leveling problem with storage. Hu et al. [12] employed advanced sparse Bayesian predictive modeling (SBPM) methodology to capture the underlying correspondence between capacity loss and sample entropy. Sample entropy of short voltages displayed an effective variable of capacity loss. You et al. [13] proposed a data-driven approach to trace battery SOH by using data, such as current, voltage, and temperature, as well as historical distributions. Song et al. [14] proposed a data-driven hybrid remaining useful life estimation approach by fussing the IND-AR (Iterative nonlinear degradation autoregressive model) and empirical model via the state-space model in RPF (Regularized particle filter) for spacecraft lithium-ion batteries. Zhou et al. [15] combined Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models for the prediction of lithium-ion batteries’ Remaining Useful Life (RUL) in the Battery Management System (BMS), which is used in electric vehicles. Chen et al. [16] proposed a hybrid approach by combining Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) de-noising technique, ARIMA, and GM (Gray Model) (1,1) models for battery RUL prediction.

The ARIMA model has been one of the most widely used models in time-series forecasting [17,18,19]. Kavasseri et al. [20] examines the use of fractional-ARIMA or f-ARIMA models to forecast wind speeds on the day-ahead (24 h) and two-day-ahead (48 h) horizons. A hybridization of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and the ARIMA model is proposed by Khashei et al. [21] to overcome the mentioned limitation of ANNs and yield a more accurate forecasting model than traditional hybrid ARIMA-ANNs models. The annual energy consumption in Iran is forecasted by using three patterns of ARIMA–ANFIS model by Barak et al [22].

ARIMA is used in forecasting social, economic, engineering, foreign exchange, and stock problems. It predicts future values of a time series using a linear combination of its past values and a series of errors [23,24,25,26,27]. Since batteries in the data center are always on charging mode, the deep discharge is a rare occurrence for batteries and their distinctive internal chemistry causes different behaviors like stationary or stochastic for each battery. In addition, failure data is not available in real life which makes it a challenge to accurately predict the battery status before its first failure. For this paper, we developed a cluster-assisted ARIMA model framework to improve the accurate prediction of battery voltage. Clustered patterns are utilized as external regressors to improve the accuracy of the ARIMA model and provide a more accurate indication of battery status in the future. Clustering in machine learning is the grouping of a similar set of data points. This aspect is used to group the patterns of batteries within the data center and improve the forecasting model instead of predicting thousands of batteries individually. Clustering algorithms, like Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), hierarchical, fuzzy, k-shape, and TADPole all have unique functionality for grouping similar data points, and the features selected by clustering improve the model forecasting accuracy [28,29,30]. The proposed cluster-assisted forecasting results are compared with actual battery data and without clustered ARIMA forecasting.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the features of the data center and data set used for the study. Section 3 describes data preprocessing and explain the methodology by introducing the algorithms for cluster consistency and clustered ARIMA forecasting. Section 4 shows the steps to implement the proposed clustered forecasting method. Section 5 demonstrates the battery cluster consistency detection results and cluster-assisted ARIMA forecasting, as well as discusses the effectiveness of the method by comparing the results with actual data and without the cluster-assisted forecasting ARIMA model. Section 6 concludes this work.

2. Overview of the Data Set

In this paper, data is collected from a large-scale social media company located in China. One year of data is used for research with 470,226 data points and a sampling interval time of 1 min. This data set includes the variables of data center’s main power, transmission units, battery units, cooling systems, and DC (Direct Current)  load values. Data set variables are shown in 

Table 1. Data center’s data set with all 470,226 feature instances.

Data Center Features	Type	Attributes
Phase current/active/factor	Power	12
3-Phase active/power/factor	Power	6
HVDC module load/voltage	Transmission units	11
HVDC DC module current/volt	Transmission units	12
Battery group current/state	Battery units	4
Voltage/Resistance/Temperature	Battery units	120
PDU branch current	server units	24
AC supply/return temperature	Cooling system	24
Humidity	Cooling system	19
AC coil temperature	Cooling system	6
Up/Down front temperature	Cooling system	24
DC meter volt/current	DC unit	4

.

Our objective is to develop a scalable clustering framework to improve the forecasting accuracy of the ARIMA model for battery voltages in data centers. Voltage measurement of individual batteries is a common practice in data centers whereas other parameters like current and charging regimes are also collectively measured from a group of batteries. Voltage is utilized in the simplest of BMS of small vehicles to large scale data centers. Our data has voltage from 40 batteries; and battery aging features are selected from domain knowledge of batteries [8].

3. Methodology

Figure 2 shows the flowchart of the proposed method and the steps of the proposed method are given as follows:

• Data Preprocessing
  • Step 1: First, separate the battery voltage data from the data set. Extract the historic values of first-month battery voltages and keep updating the real-time voltage values.
• Cluster Consistency
  • Step 2: Carry out clustering analysis on first month data and real time updated data set and proceed to the step 3.
  • Step 3: Match the clustering results of first month and updated month data for cluster consistency. If cluster members are different in first and updated month clusters, then go to the next step.
• Clustered ARIMA Forecasting
  • Step 4: Fit an ARIMA model using the cluster members as external predictors to forecast the battery’s voltage status, and if a cluster has only 1 member, then fit an ARIMA model without the external predictor. If the forecasted voltage has a declining trend, then the battery health is dropping comparative to its first-month’s cluster members.

3.1. Data Preprocessing

Data cleaning is the first step in the data preprocessing step by identifying the missing values and correcting the raw data for analysis. See Section 2 for multiple features of the data set. Battery voltage data is utilized to forecast battery health with the assumption that all the batteries are new and equally healthy. Data centers keep batteries in a safe and controlled environment, and all the batteries would show identical behavior and over fitted prediction models if short intervals are selected considering batteries do not fail in their early months. Our analysis suggests that discharge events occur sometimes once in a few months and sometimes twice a month. In order to analyze the effect of these events in a consistent manner, we used one year of data and divided it by 12 to update the data on each iteration on monthly basis. The first month’s data was extracted from the data set and used as a standard for comparing clustering and voltage status with real-time updated data. See Section 4.1.

3.2. Cluster Consistency

We now present our proposed cluster based predictor configuration Algorithm 1 for batteries in a data center. The approach to update the clustered predictor for forecasting on monthly basis is presented in this algorithm. For a detailed description of the k-shape-based and DTW clustering algorithm, see Appendix A.1 and Appendix A.2.

Algorithm 1: Configuration Algorithm for Cluster Based Predictor.

Clustering algorithms accept the battery voltage data set, $V_{ij}$, as the first-month historic voltage data set and $L{V}_{ij}$ as the latest and updated voltage data set, where $\left(i\right)$ is the time, and $\left(j\right)$ is the total number of batteries. $FB$ is the set of batteries when clustering is applied in the first month. $LB$ is the set of batteries when clustering is applied in the latest month. $DA$ is the set of inconsistent batteries’ cluster which is a result of a comparison between clustering sets of latest month $\left(LB\right)$ and first month $\left(FB\right)$. If $DA$ is not equal to ∅, it is an inconsistent or outlined battery cluster. $MB$ and $MC$ are the first and latest month clusters’ mean voltage sets, respectively. These sets also represent cluster voltage status comparative to other clusters. The difference between $MB$ and $MC$ gives us $DM$. If $DM$ is not equal to ∅, cluster voltage status changes.

3.3. Clustered ARIMA Forecasting

Algorithm 2 is proposed to improve the ARIMA accuracy by utilizing clustering results as external regressors to forecast battery health. ARIMA models are the integration of Auto-regressive (AR) models and Moving Average models. ARIMA models are good for forecasting stationary time-series data [31]. Input sets are either $DA$ or $DM$. Extracting a battery element from the set, $v_j$, makes a new set $DC$. Extracting another element from $DA$ from the remaining elements results in R, where R is the set of predictors used to forecast the battery element in $DC$. Then, fit an ARIMA model with R predictors to forecast $DC$. $AF$ is the battery’s forecasted voltage values.

Algorithm 2: Clustered ARIMA Forecasting.

4. Software Implementation

4.1. Cluster Consistency Detection

Import the time-series data transformed into CSV format in the data preprocessing step for R programming. Dtwclust package is used for time series clustering in R. For clustering batteries, data frame should be converted into a matrix by (as.matrix) function. Visualize the clustering results using Plot function. Repeat this process every month until an inconsistent cluster is detected and then perform clustered ARIMA forecasting (see Section 4.2). An overview of the clustering inconsistency detection procedure is shown in Figure 3.

4.2. Implementing Clustered ARIMA Forecasting

The objective of this procedure is to improve the forecasting accuracy of ARIMA model by utilizing cluster members as an external regressor. An overview of the method is shown in Figure 3. Import “Forecast” package in R. Select a battery from the inconsistent cluster to forecast. Perform ACF (Auto Correlation Function), PACF (Partial Auto Correlation Function), and Dickey-Fuller test to check the data stationarity. Use auto.ARIMA function to build the fitting model for the selected battery. Select cluster predictors for “Xreg” function in the fitting model; if the cluster contains only one battery, then “Xreg” function is not required. Use the “forecast” function to forecast the battery voltage. If the declining trend is shown, the cluster is degrading, and if the trend is stable, then the battery will be stable in the future, as well.

5. Result and Discussion

5.1. Data Center Battery Setup

Forty VRLA batteries were installed in a room, with 20 batteries in each rack with an average voltage level between 13 and 14 V. Voltage data was collected in the BMS of the data center. There were four discharge cycles and three power surges during one year of battery life in the data center, as shown in Figure 4.

5.2. Battery Voltage Time Series Clustering

Table 2. Silhouette index test for cluster number selection.

Silhouette Index
Time	Cluster 2	Cluster 3	Cluster 4	Cluster 5
Month1	0.7356	0.7554	0.6295	0.5831
Month8	0.5857	0.5935	0.5440	0.4960
Month9	0.5741	0.6076	0.5607	0.4737

shows the Silhouette index test values, which were used to select number of clusters when clustering is applied on the batteries (see Figure 5). Figure 6 shows consistent cluster members from the first eight months. Inconsistent cluster is shown in Figure 7 after nine months. Battery 6 is now separated by battery 36 and 39, which was originally in the same cluster from the first month. Implementing DTW clustering and k-shape-based clustering on similar data resulted in different cluster members, which can be seen in Figure 8 and Figure 9.

This change in cluster consistency is an indication of a change in battery voltage behavior. Utilizing this new information as a starting point to predict the battery health from each cluster, an improved accuracy forecasting model is discussed in Section 5.3.

5.3. ARIMA Forecasting

The proposed clustered ARIMA approach was evaluated by comparing actual voltage with $C_K$ predictors (k-shape-based clustered predictors), Single predictors (without clustering), Total predictors (complete data), and $C_{DTW}$ predictors (DTW clustered predictors). The metrics used are Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Average Error (MAE), and Mean Average Percentage Error (MAPE). One battery from each cluster, such as Battery 6, Battery 15, Battery 19, and Battery 36, was selected for demonstration. The cluster inconsistency was detected in the 9th month, thus transforming the data of 9th month for the forecasting model. ACF and PACF for the transformed data are shown in Figure 10.

Table 3. The augmented Dickey-Fuller.

	Dickey-Fuller	Lag Order	p-Value
Battery 6	−5.6687	3	0.01
Battery 15	−4.8736	3	0.01
Battery 19	−5.1239	3	0.01
Battery 36	−7.1468	3	0.01

shows the augmented Dickey-Fuller test of the selected batteries. Batteries were selected from different clusters, and each battery showed different voltage behavior, which would require a different fitting model for each battery. The forecast package used the (auto.ARIMA) function to automatically select the best-fitted model by comparing with the other models. AIC (Akaike information criterion) and BIC (Bayesian information criterion) are both penalized-likelihood criteria that were used for fit criteria [32].

Table 4. Fitted models AIC and BICvalues.

	Battery 6		Battery 36			Battery 15
	T-Predictor	S =${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{K}}$-Predictor	${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{K}}$-Predictor	S-Predictor	T-Predictor	${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{K}}$-Predictor	S-Predictor	T-Predictor
AIC	−251.59	−268.59	−244.52	−228.09	−234.49	−297.4	−220.57	−255.08
BIC	−249.5	−206.81	−229.86	−207.31	−217.01	−288.96	−206.27	−252.99

and

Table 5. Fitted models AIC and BIC values with Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) Clustering.

	Battery 19		Battery 36			Battery 15
	T-Predictor	S =${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{DTW}}$-Predictor	${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{DTW}}$-Predictor	S-Predictor	T-Predictor	${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{DTW}}$-Predictor	S-Predictor	T-Predictor
AIC	−280.93	−297.34	−264.44	−228.09	−234.49	−280.38	−220.57	−255.08
BIC	−268.46	−268.01	−243.74	−207.31	−217.01	−268.31	−206.27	−252.99

show the AIC and BIC values of the best-fitted model on the batteries for the Total, Single, $C_K$, and $C_{DTW}$ predictors scenario.

Battery 6 (cluster 2) is a single member in cluster 2, and it has zero external predictor in the cluster at the point of cluster inconsistency detection by k-shape clustering. This makes battery 6 (cluster 2) a special case because $C_K$ predictor and Single predictor case is equal for battery 6. Prediction results of battery 6 with Single/$C_K$ predictor have better accuracy than Total predictor. This argument is further verified for Battery 15 (cluster 1) and Battery 36 (cluster 3) with the metrics comparison of the $C_K$ predictor, Single predictor, and Total predictor in

Table 6. Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) performance comparison of k-shape-based Clustered predictor ($C_K$), Single predictor (S), and Total predictor (T). RMSE = Root Mean Square Error; MAE = Mean Average Error; MAPE = Mean Average Percentage Error.

	Battery 6		Battery 36			Battery 15
	T-Predictor	S =${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{K}}$-Predictor	${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{K}}$-Predictor	S-Predictor	T-Predictor	${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{K}}$-Predictor	S-Predictor	T-Predictor
RMSE	0.0253	0.0224	0.0252	0.0285	0.0283	0.0180	0.0282	0.0243
MAE	0.0206	0.0167	0.0186	0.0204	0.0219	0.0149	0.0225	0.0191
MAPE	0.1523	0.1233	0.1358	0.1489	0.1597	0.1096	0.1646	0.1398

. Battery 15 (cluster 1), Battery 36 (cluster 2), and Battery 19 (cluster 3) are the chosen batteries from $C_{DTW}$ clustering.

Table 7. ARIMA performance comparison of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) Clustered predictor ($C_{DTW}$), Single predictor (S), and Total predictor (T).

	Battery 19		Battery 36			Battery 15
	T-Predictor	S =${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{DTW}}$-Predictor	${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{DTW}}$-Predictor	S-predictor	T-Predictor	${\mathit{C}}_{\mathit{DTW}}$-Predictor	S-Predictor	T-Predictor
RMSE	0.0192	0.0160	0.0267	0.0285	0.0283	0.0200	0.0282	0.0243
MAE	0.0159	0.0130	0.0210	0.0204	0.0219	0.0174	0.0225	0.0191
MAPE	0.1198	0.0977	0.1531	0.1489	0.1597	0.1274	0.1646	0.1398

shows the metrics comparison of the $C_{DTW}$ predictor, Single predictor, and Total predictor. ARIMA accuracy is improved when implemented with DTW and k-shape-based clustering. Results show that k-shape-based clustered ARIMA model has better accuracy than DTW.

Comparison of voltage forecast of Battery 6, Battery 15, Battery 19, and Battery 36 with actual voltage, $C_K$ predictor, Single predictor, $C_{DTW}$ predictor, and Total predictor is shown in Figure 11, Figure 12, Figure 13 and Figure 14, respectively. Battery 6 is a single member of k-shape-based cluster 2, so it is compared with $C_K$ predictor, Total predictor, and actual voltage in Figure 11. Battery 19 is the only member of Dynamic Time Warping (DWT) cluster 3, so it is compared with $C_{DTW}$ predictor, Total predictor, and actual voltage values in Figure 13. It is evident from Figure 6 and Figure 7 and these figures that the $C_K$ predictor model is a better fit for the battery voltage data.

5.4. Effectiveness of Clustered ARIMA Approach

Identifying a battery with a declining voltage is difficult in the data center, as can be seen in Figure 4. Voltage equalization depends on the voltage threshold levels, which is not a better solution for batteries in the data center because it causes false alarms during charge and discharge cycles, and, since the batteries are always on a charging mode, any flaw cannot be observed until it is too late, whereas weak batteries fail when there is a discharge cycle due to power supply failure. As battery 6 failed only in the battery discharging event caused by the power failure, Figure 15 shows that it resumes its voltage status from where it left off when charging recommences. Our proposed clustered ARIMA framework predicts the battery voltage and provides an estimate of battery status in the future with improved accuracy. Similarly, one-year actual resistance values of Battery 6, 15, 19, and 36 verify the predicted results in Figure 16.

6. Conclusions

Considering that the prediction model has a significant impact on a forecasting battery’s degradation status, in order to improve the ARIMA model forecasting accuracy, a clustered ARIMA forecasting framework was proposed, with the 40 batteries in the data center. Cluster-assisted results can significantly improve the ARIMA forecasting accuracy compared with the Single predictor and Total data predictors. It was observed that the k-shape-based clustering assisted results are more accurate compared to Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) clustering. A few challenges with our data-driven technique implications are the cleaning and preparation of data set, loss of data, and missing values that have to be addressed to apply the proposed method.