An intelligent tool for maintenance scheduling of distribution systems

This paper presents an expert system developed for a distribution company with the intention of helping the engineer responsible for the requests for equipment outage for preventive maintenance or network expansion. Usually, in order to decide whether these requests should be approved or not, the engineer verifies the possibility of transferring the load during outage considering constraints, such as which and what kind of consumers will be affected by the service, and whether they should be warned about the interruption, or if the timing is inadequate for them, etc.. The support of an intelligent system will allow the engineer to consider many other aspects, for instance, whether it is possible to join two requests in one interruption and, specially, to monitor the reliability indices of the area when the service under analysis is performed. The main objective is to minimise the frequency and duration of interruptions for preventive maintenance avoiding penalties from the regulatory agency.