Automatic contingency analysis integration to an expert system in scheduled outage

Regular works of maintenance in power systems are necessary to guarantee the supply of energy, but cause, unavoidably, the outage of its equipments. This activity is known as a scheduled outage, its procedures being based on planning engineers' knowledge and experience. The changes in the power system, as a consequence of the maintenance planning, can lead to unexpected behavior with possible new emergency situations for the dispatchers. In this context, there is no explicit criterion to evaluate, in a wider way, the quality of the results of an outage programming. The present work describes the studies on an expert system having, as its objective, to associate engineers' practical knowledge to the severity ranking of the possible critical emergencies through automatic contingency analysis. It is expected that the demonstration of the feasibility to obtain and apply these indexes will allow the future development of an evaluation criteria that will support the analysis done by the engineers involved with scheduled outages.