AN ADVANCED DECISION-SUPPORT TOOL FOR ELECTRICITY INFRASTRUCTURE OPERATIONS

A major failure in the electricity infrastructure would almost certainly lead to significant societal disruption and massive economic losses. The reliable operation of the electricity infrastructure is an extremely challenging task because human operators have to consider thousands of possible configurations in near real time to choose the best option. Nevertheless, the operation of the electricity infrastructure is largely based on operator experience with limited real-time decision support. This makes it difficult for operators to anticipate, recognize and respond to anomalies caused by human error, natural disasters or cyber attacks. This paper proposes an advanced decision-support tool for electricity infrastructure operations. The tool converts large amounts of data into actionable information to help operators monitor the power grid status in real time. It performs trend analysis at the regional or system level to enable operators to foresee and discern emergencies; it performs cluster analysis to help operators identify the relationships between system configurations and affected assets; and it interactively assesses candidate actions to assist operators in making effective and timely decisions.