A practical expert system for transformer restoration advice

Abstract

The control centres of New Zealand's power transmission network arc flooded with alarm messages during a major system outage. A majority of these faults involves the transformer trips. To help the system controllers to restore the transformers Transpower NZ Ltd., New Zealand's power transmission company, has developed a expert control system to perform a real-time analysis of the incoming alarms, identify transformer related events, analyse the faults and provide a real-time restoration advise on transformer restoration. This paper describes the problem tackled by Transpower's system controllers and our expert control system that assists in solving the problem. It discusses the types of knowledge represented, the architecture involved, some implementation details and the performance analysis.