A proposal of a supporting expert system for outage planning of electric power facilities retaining high power supply reliability. II. Knowledge processing and simulation results

For pt.I see ibid., vol.13, no.4, p.1453-8 (1998). A prototype system has been constructed to validate the proposed method for assisting outage work scheduling that has been described in part I. The prototype system has the following three functions: (1) to identify outage areas to be caused by requested outage works, (2) to generate a work unit into which as many outage works as possible should be merged, and (3) to schedule work units and to determine a suitable system configuration to assure a high supply reliability. In order to realize these functions, it is necessary to deal with demands of planning engineers for improving power system security as well as some constraints such as the number of available workers and ordering among outage works. Therefore, knowledge processing is mandatory since these factors are difficult to formulate in conventional procedure oriented languages. The proposed system has been successfully applied to test cases with 50 outage work requests taken from a part of the 110 kV transmission line system. Results obtained have made clear the superiority of the proposed method to the current scheduling based on just the experience of the maintenance engineers.