The power capability of the lithium-ion battery is a key performance indicator for electric vehicle, and it is intimately correlated with the acceleration, regenerative braking and gradient climbing power requirements. Therefore, an accurate power capability or state-of-power prediction is critical to a battery management system, which can help the battery to work in suitable area and prevent the battery from over-charging and over-discharging. However, the power capability is easily affected by dynamic load, voltage variation and temperature. In this paper, three different constraints in power capability prediction are introduced, and the advantages and disadvantages of the three methods are deeply analyzed. Furthermore, a multi-limited approach for the power capability prediction is proposed, which can overcome the drawbacks of the three methods. Subsequently, the extended Kalman filter algorithm is employed for model based state-of-power prediction. In order to verify the proposed method, diverse experiments are executed to explore the efficiency, robustness, and precision. The results indicate that the proposed method can improve the precision and robustness obviously. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.