Artificial Intelligence-Based Power Transformer Health Index for Handling Data Uncertainty

Power transformer is a critical and expensive asset in electric transmission and distribution networks. It is essential to monitor the health condition of all power transformer fleet in such networks to avoid unwanted outages. The health index (HI) is a quick and efficient way to assess the condition of power transformers based on multi-criteria. While Power transformer HI method has been well presented in the literature, not much attention was given to handle the uncertainty and reliability of this method due to unavailability of used data. Therefore, this paper aims to tackle this issue through employing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based techniques to reveal the health condition of power transformers with high accuracy and at the same time handling data uncertainty. The proposed HI approach assesses the power transformer insulation system based on oil quality, dissolved gas analysis (DGA), and paper condition. In this regard, collected data from 504, 150-kV transformers are used to establish the proposed AI-models. Seven AI algorithms including k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Naïve Bayes (NB), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), and Decision Tree are investigated. A performance comparison of the proposed AI-based HI models is carried out using the scoring-weighting-based HI method as the reference. Results show that RF model provides the best performance in predicting power transformer HI with an accuracy of 97.3%.