A proposal of a supporting expert system for outage planning of electric power facilities retaining high power supply reliability

It is necessary for a power system to undertake maintenance works regularly to secure stable power supply, which inevitably cause outage of associated apparatus. This problem, referred to as the outage planning of an electric power system in this paper, has been so far made based on the knowledge and experiences of planning engineers. However, the scheduling made by the engineers is not necessarily optimal since there are no rational criterion to judge the results. Furthermore, this problem belongs to a class of combinatorial optimization problems. Therefore, we propose a supporting expert system for the outage planning retaining high power supply reliability. This paper presents some issues on the outage planning and an outline of the proposed supporting system. The concept of work unit is introduced and three security indices are utilized to properly merge several related outage work into the same group.