Verification & Validation of Power Systems Control Centres KBS

In last decades Knowledge Based System (KBS) became a common tool in a large number of Power Systems Control Centres (CC). In fact, the quantity, diversity and complexity of KBS increased significantly leading to important changes in KBS structure, especially in its nuclear components: knowledge representation and reasoning. The design of KBS applied in extremely dynamic environments demands the consideration of incomplete and/or incoherent knowledge as well as temporal aspects of knowledge. The Verification and Validation (V&V) process allows stating whether the requirements have been correctly and completely fulfilled. In Control Centres domain the V&V process intends to assure the reliability of the installed applications, even under incident conditions. SPARSE is a KBS used in the Portuguese Transmission Network (REN) for incident analysis and power restoration. VERITAS is a tool initially developed to verify SPARSE Knowledge Base (KB). This tool performs KB structural analysis allowing knowledge anomalies detection. Originally, VERITAS used a non-temporal KB verification approach. Although it proved to be very efficient in other KBS verification in SPARSE case some important limitations were detected. This paper addresses the SPARSE V&V process, reporting VERITAS last improvements, namely the Temporal Reasoning analysis.