The battery management systems (BMS) is an essential emerging component of both electric and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) alongside with modem power systems. With the BMS integration, safe and reliable battery operation can be guaranteed through the accurate determination of the battery state of charge (SOC), its state of health (SOH) and the instantaneous available power. Therefore, undesired power fade and capacity loss problems can be avoided. Because of the electrochemical actions inside the battery, such emerging storage energy technology acts differently with operating and environment condition variations. Consequently, the SOC estimation mechanism should cope with the probable changes and uncertainties in the battery characteristics to ensure a permanent precise SOC determination over the battery lifetime. This paper aims to study and design the BMS for the Li-ion batteries. For this purpose, the system mathematical equations are presented. Then, the battery electrical model is developed. By imposing known charge/discharge current signals, all the parameters of such electrical model are identified using voltage drop measurements. Then, the extended kalman filter (EKF) methodology is employed to this nonlinear system to determine the most convenient battery SOC. This methodology is experimentally implemented using C language through micro-controller. The proposed BMS technique based on EKF is experimentally validated to determine the battery SOC values correlated to those reached by the Coulomb counting method with acceptable small errors. (C) 2017 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.