A fuzzy rule-based system for crew management of distribution systems in large-scale multiple outages

Significant damages caused by extreme weather conditions such as typhoon, flood, storm could result in multiple and widely-spread outages in distribution systems. The electric utilities will send repair crew to deal with the outages as soon as possible. Due to the limits of repair resources in a large-scale multiple contingencies, an effective resource management is especially crucial In this paper, a fuzzy rule-based system is proposed to assist the dispatchers in crew management in case of large-scale multiple outages happen. Fuzzy logic is exploited to determine the priority of repair sequences of the events. The proposed fuzzy membership functions include the functions of the types of key customers, the estimated time needed for the repair, the amount of resources needed, and the easiness of restoration after the repair. To increase the availability of the resources and meet the special requirements of events, fuzzy rules and fuzzy membership functions are proposed to determine the priority of each crew and vehicle to be dispatched to the Held. Besides, pre-scheduling for the outages that lack some resources temporarily is proposed. The proposed system is developed in the basis of the integrated system of automatic mapping/facility management (AM/FM) and the outage management system (OMS) of the Taiwan-power company. A test is implemented to show the effectiveness of the proposed system.