Agent technologies for power system plant monitoring and diagnosis

Agent technologies provide the basis for improved plant monitoring and diagnosis in the electrical utility industry. Plant condition monitoring systems tend to generate large volumes of data which need to be analysed and interpreted. Often, this may require many different approaches, including those that fall into the category of intelligent systems. Multi-agent systems technology offers a number of advantages for such applications. As an example, this talk describes a multi-agent system developed for power transformer monitoring. It then cover the extension of the agent framework to support power system wide plant monitoring and fault diagnosis to support operational engineers. The research challenges in this area are discussed throughout the presentation.