AN EXPERT SYSTEM FOR SUBSTATION FAULT-DIAGNOSIS AND ALARM PROCESSING

An expert system for substation fault diagnosis and alarm processing developed by the Electric Power Systems Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens is presented. It is written in TURBO PROLOG and is implemented on a personal computer. The expert system includes many characteristics of an expert system cell because it can be expanded easily by adding new information to its knowledge base or by changing the existing information. The basic idea behind this expert system is to provide a non-expert with the necessary information and interaction in order to make a fault diagnosis through the substation alarms in a very friendly environment. The main task of the expert system is to replace the troubleshooting manuals of substation equipment and human expertise in substation fault diagnosis and alarm processing with a very user-friendly computer environment and to take advantage of the user's accumulated experience to expand and modify the knowledge base of the expert system. The expert system can be connected directly with a PCSCADA system through a simple software interface written in C for On-Line data acquisition. The expert system has been tested by human experts working for years in the Public Power Corporation of Greece, and can be used by universities and utilities for training and operational purposes.