To increase lifetime, safety, and energy usage battery management systems (BMS) for Li-ion batteries have to be capable of estimating the state of charge (SOC) of the battery cells with a very low estimation error. The accurate SOC estimation and the real time reliability are critical issues for a BMS. In general an increasing complexity of the estimation methods leads to higher accuracy. On the other hand it also leads to a higher computational load and may exceed the BMS limitations or increase its costs. An approach to evaluate and verify estimation algorithms is presented as a requisite prior the release of the battery system. The approach consists of an analysis concerning the SOC estimation accuracy, the code properties, complexity, the computation time, and the memory usage. Furthermore, a study for estimation methods is proposed for their evaluation and validation with respect to convergence behavior, parameter sensitivity, initialization error, and performance. In this work, the introduced analysis is demonstrated with four of the most published model-based estimation algorithms including Luenberger observer, sliding-mode observer, Extended Kalman Filter and Sigma-point Kalman Filter. The experiments under dynamic current conditions are used to verify the real time functionality of the BMS. The results show that a simple estimation method like the sliding-mode observer can compete with the Kalman-based methods presenting less computational time and memory usage. Depending on the battery system's application the estimation algorithm has to be selected to fulfill the specific requirements of the BMS. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.