An intelligent tool for distribution substations troubleshooting and maintenance scheduling

The authors describe SUBES, a rule-based expert system approach for distribution substations troubleshooting and maintenance scheduling. These complex decision tasks are currently performed by highly experienced engineers, whose knowledge can be expressed as a set of production rules. As the inference mechanism for the knowledge processing, first order logic is natural. Therefore the system has been implemented in Turbo-Prolog. SUBES works interactively: a very user-friendly environment for the interaction between computer and end user is achieved by a menu-driven dialog and a multi-window display. The transfer of new knowledge-experience gained is very easy since the modification/expansion of the knowledge base can be carried out in a very simple way. The provided explanation module enables the operator under training to understand the reasoning process followed by the system. The system can be used for educational as well as engineering purposes