Alarm Processing and Reconfiguration in Power Distribution Systems

Supervision of power distribution systems is a major concern for electricity distributors. It consists in analysing alarms emitted by the devices, detecting permanent faults, locating these faults and reconfiguring the network to maintain the optimal quality of service. EDF is developing the AUSTRAL platform which provide distribution control centers with a set of advanced real-time functions for alarm processing, diagnosis and power supply restoration. After an overview of the general architecture of AUSTRAL, this paper focuses on the alarm processing and restoration functions, which both use model-based approaches.