A practical expert system for transformer restoration advice

The control centres of New Zealand´s power transmission network arc flooded with alarm messages during a major system outage. A majority of these faults involves the transformer trips. To help the system controllers to restore the transformers Transpower NZ Ltd., New Zealand´s power transmission company, has developed a expert control system to perform a real-time analysis of the incoming alarms, identify transformer related events, analyse the faults and provide a real-time restoration advise on transformer restoration. This paper describes the problem tackled by Transpower´s system controllers and our expert control system that assists in solving the problem. It discusses the types of knowledge represented, the architecture involved, some implementation details and the performance analysis.