Small World Stratification for Power System Fault Diagnosis with Causality

Small World Stratification for Power System Fault Diagnosis with Causality

The objective of this project is to investigate and develop a fault diagnosis with causality methodology for power distribution systems using Small World (SW) strategy and Hierarchical Clustering (HC) technology to substantially improve fault diagnosis accuracy and reasoning.

Intellectual Merit:

The intellectual merits of this project are: (1) The proposed work can provide effective and efficient use of available information to give accurate power distribution fault diagnosis and to discover proper fault causality knowledge, which can substantially enhance the subsequent power distribution fault prognosis and mitigation control. (2) The proposed work will provide a general framework from which to evaluate cases with similar symptoms, geographical settings and topological connectivity for the fault diagnosis and will give the context for causality. The project will use power distribution (a typical complex system) as a test bed to evaluate the effectiveness on the investigation of using Small World (SW) strategy and Hierarchical Clustering (HC) technology for fault diagnosis with causality on complex systems.

Broader Impacts:

The framework can be applied to a wide variety of other technical areas, including power transmission systems, transportation systems, manufacturing systems, healthcare systems, energy systems, homeland security where it will facilitate performance improvements and advancements in fault diagnosis technologies.

The educational component of this project pertains to graduate and undergraduate research, senior design projects, departmental seminars, and high school internships at the university laboratory. Technologies and other results will be integrated into courses and curriculum. Industrial collaboration with a local utility company (Progress Energy) involving student interns has been established for this project. Timely dissemination of research results to the research and technical community as well as the general public will occur through papers, conference presentations, tutorials, short courses and a dedicated publicly accessible website.