A new logic-based alarm analyzer for on-line operational environment

Existing fault diagnostic techniques for power systems are based on the operation of breakers using on-line alarm messages available from the energy management systems (EMSs). Some utility systems also acquire, on-line, the information on relay operations in order to increase the precision of fault diagnosis. This paper proposes a new on-line fault diagnosis system called Intelligent Alarm Analyzer (IAA). This paper identifies the information from sequence-of-events recorders (SERs) at the substations that can be used in the EMS environment. The breaker operations together with the selected SER information provide sufficient data to help pinpoint the fault location(s) and malfunctioning device(s) online. The proposed IAA is capable of handling transmission line, busbar and transformer faults as well as relay and breaker malfunctions. The other unique feature of IAA is its logic-based algorithms implemented in an object-oriented software structure. Based on our testing with the actual data from ENEL, the Italian power system, the proposed implementation is highly efficient and promising for the on-line environment