Cause-Effect Modeling and Simulation of Power Distribution Fault Events

Modeling and simulation are important to study power distribution faults due to the limited actual data and high cost of experimentations. Although a number of software packages are available to simulate the electric signals, approaches for simulating fault events in different environments are not well developed yet. In this paper, we propose a framework for modeling and simulating fault events in power distribution systems based on environmental factors and cause-effect relations among them. The spatial and temporal aspects of significant environmental factors leading to various faults are modeled as raster maps and probability distributions, respectively. The cause-effect relations are expressed as fuzzy rules and a hierarchical fuzzy inference system is built to infer the probability of faults given the simulated environments. This work will be helpful in fault diagnosis for different local systems and provide a configurable data source to other researchers and engineers in similar areas as well. A sample fault simulator we have developed is used to illustrate the approaches.