Distribution fault diagnosis using a hybrid algorithm of fuzzy classification and artificial immune systems

Effective distribution outage cause identification can help expedite the restoration procedure and improve the system availability. The fuzzy classification E-algorithm and the immune system inspired classification algorithm, artificial immune recognition system (AIRS), have demonstrated good capabilities in outage cause identification, especially with the existence of imbalanced data. E-algorithm extracts inference rules but is computational demanding; AIRS has the quick searching capability but is lack of rule extraction capability. In this paper, fuzzy artificial immune recognition system (FAIRS) has been proposed to take advantage of the strengths of E-algorithm and AIRS. FAIRS is applied to Duke Energy outage data for cause identification using three major customer interruption causes (tree, animal, and lightning) as prototypes; and FAIRS achieves comparable fault diagnosis performance with two base algorithms while being able to extract linguistic rules to explain the inference within significantly reduced computing time than E-algorithm.