A HEURISTIC BASED FUZZY-REASONING APPROACH FOR DISTRIBUTION-SYSTEM SERVICE RESTORATION

A fuzzy reasoning approach is proposed for the service restoration of a distribution system. After the location of a fault has been identified and the faulted zone has been isolated, it is important for the operators to reach a proper service restoration plan in order to restore the electricity service outside the faulted zone. The operators tend to use their past experience and heuristic rules to devise such a restoration plan because it must satisfy a lot of practical needs and objectives such as minimal number of switching operations, no interrupted customers, no overloaded components,..., etc. Thus, service restoration is a multiple-objective problem with some objectives contradictory to each other. In most cases, compromise must be made in order to reach a plan which meets the operators' practical needs. In addition, the operators' needs and heuristic rules are often expressed in imprecise linguistic terms. In this paper, fuzzy set notation is employed to deal with these imprecise linguistic variables and a set of fuzzy reasoning procedures are developed to implement the operators' heuristic rules. These procedures can be employed to solve the multiple-objective problem of service restoration described in imprecise linguistic variables. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fuzzy reasoning approach, service restoration on a distribution system within the service area of Taipei West District Office of Taiwan Power Company is examined. It is found that a proper restoration plan can be reached very efficiently by the proposed approach.