This paper proposes modeling of abnormal cell overheating caused by internal short circuit in a cell of a Li-ion battery string by augmenting the cell state space model with unknown input disturbance. Furthermore, with minimum number of temperature sensors, in order to identify which of the cells in the string is experiencing the abnormal overheating, a multiple model estimator (MME) is used. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MME can detect the abnormally overheating cell as well as quickly detect that an abnormal overheating event occurred in the battery string. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.