Toast: The Power System Operator's Assistant

The environments in which power system operators work are becoming more complex. New constraints are appearing, old constraints are tightening, and the number of decision variables is increasing. To cope with these trends, operators need intelligent assistants to help manage information and lighten their decision-making burdens. Such assistants can be divided into two types: Phase-1 assistants for off-line uses and Phase-2 assistants for on-line uses and Phase-2 assistants for on-line, real-time uses. Toast is an evolving Phase-1 assistant. Of the nine possible functions of an assistant, Toast has immediate potential in two-diagnosis and criticism. Its diagnostic knowledge, though hardly complete, is extensive enough to be useful to human operators. In contrast, its abilities to critique proposed courses of action are much less developed and, as yet, consist only of facilities to simulate some of the these courses of action. Toast has been written in Cops, a programming environment that allows for distributed processing and has a readily extensible library of both symbolic and numerical programs. These features should make the task of expanding Toast relatively painless. Of the many directions in which expansions could occur, we plan on adding diagnostic capabilities in the area of power system security. This area was identified in a study as the most worthy of development.