Automatic Design for Power Systems

Abstract

An automatic design method for power systems, to control electrical loads provided by customers and to ensure the power supply for the loads, is described. This method features (I) an electrical equipment model including the possible connections among each electrical equipment, (II) knowledge association networks to reduce maintenance cost of knowledge-base and to improve efficiency to select/specify electrical equipment, (III) a planning algorithm to find electrical path to control the electrical loads and to ensure the power supply, and (IV) the reactive re-design to automate to edit the power systems. APEC3 (Advanced Plant Engineering Cycle tool version 3) is an automatic design tool for power systems that supports electrical engineering processes in developing single line diagrams, specification balance statements (design rationales) and item lists. When engineers modify equipment specifications, APEC3 invokes the redesign function which automatically changes the specifications of all relevant equipment. To evaluate the effectiveness of the method, APEC3 was used in designing practical power systems of steel plants. The results showed that APEC3 can reduce the design time to 1/8 as compared to the usual design time. Therefore, the engineers can find optimal specifications of the power systems by evaluating a number of possibilities.