In order to characterize the voltage behavior of a lithium-ion battery for on-board electric vehicle battery management and control applications,a battery model with a moderate complexity was established.The battery open circuit voltage (OCV) as a function of state of charge (SOC) was depicted by the Nernst equation.An equivalent circuit network was adopted to describe the polarization effect of the lithium-ion battery.A linear identifiable formulation of the battery model was derived by discretizing the frequent-domain description of the battery model.The recursive least square algorithm with forgetting was applied to implement the on-line parameter calibration.The validation results show that the on-line calibrated model can accurately predict the dynamic voltage behavior of the lithium-ion battery.The maximum and mean relative errors are 1.666％ and 0.01％,respectively,in a hybrid pulse test,while 1.933％ and 0.062％,respectively,in a transient power test.The on-line parameter calibration method thereby can ensure that the model possesses an acceptable robustness to varied battery loading profiles.