Modern computing environment for power system reliability assessment

A natural movement towards artificial intelligence (AI) techniques took place in the last years in power system analysis. Many research works have used AI topics like search techniques, knowledge representation, reasoning and learning systems, as well as heuristic tools to address power system problems. This paper focuses the discussion on power system reliability evaluation and this natural transition from AI topics to a more sophisticated software design, known as intelligent agent (IA) technology. Instead of applying AI techniques to improve a single stage of the Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS), the IA architecture explores new ways to support AI topics. However, this natural movement needs to be managed through the proposal of a modern framework of power system tools, where several different techniques have to be combined in order to maximize each one´s benefits and advantages.