An Application of Hypothetical Reasoning to Outage Planning for Electric Power Facilities

This paper presents a scheduling method using hypothetical reasoning to achieve reliability in outage planning for electric power facilities. In general sense, hypothetical reasoning is a kind of non-monotonic reasoning with the ability to deal with incomplete knowledge, including a matter which cannot be verified. It consists of a problem solver and a TMS (Truth Maintenance System). We apply the framework of hypothetical reasoning to a scheduling system for outage planning. Assignment of outage works starts with knowledge of work combinations, which is gained from planning engineers, and its validity is then evaluated by power supply indices. If TMS judges work combinations to be inadequate, the knowledge involved in those combinations is identified and modified in order to maintain the consistency of knowledge bases. A useful work combination obtained by reasoning is stored in the knowledge base and is employed to make an outage plan.