KBS and macro-level systems: support of energy demand forecasting

Applications of expert systems have been flourishing in the field of strategic planning. For the energy sector, a number of expert systems have been developed for carrying out various tasks such as system design, diagnosis and trouble shooting, demand forecast and planning. A review of existing expert systems in the energy sector in general and in energy planning in particular, shows that they have mostly concentrated on the most pressing problems involving load forecast, investment planning, transmission and distribution network design, operation control, etc., in the power sector, while very few have been implemented for supporting energy planning processes. This paper presents an expert system developed for supporting the evaluation of selected variables of the medee-s, a powerful energy demand forecast model. The system was developed using the vp-Expert knowledge-based shell.