Expert self-tuning control applied to automatic voltage regulation

Power system control entails maintaining a continuous balance between electrical generation and a varying load demand, while system frequency, voltage levels and network security are preserved. However, the system can be highly complex and nonlinear, and fixed parameter controllers be unable to provide the most effective control. Adaptive control can offer a solution to such problems. It requires supervision strategies, or the addition of jacketing software to improve robustness. The protection scheme is essentially a logical network, composed of a considerable amount of heuristics and rules of thumb. Subsequent testing, evaluation and debugging can be cumbersome. A more elegant approach separates the jacketing software from the identification and control algorithms, leaving an expert system to perform all supervisory functions. This approach is adopted. CLIPS (C Language Integrated Production System) was selected as an example of a real-time expert shell. It is entirely written in the C. This simplifies integration with conventional software, and as the entire source code is provided, programmers can write their own routines to be called by CLIPS, or CLIPS itself can be embedded as a routine in another program.