9615658 Schulz Electricity has become a vital resource in our everyday lives. From car factories to business offices to universities to homes, the public depends on reliable electrical energy. A power delivery system consists of systems for the transmission and distribution of the electric power from power plants to customers. Recently there has been renewed interest in the distribution side of the power delivery system. This interest has stemmed out of an increased number of outages and reliability problems relating to the distribution system rather than the transmission system. Current research on distribution systems involves both planning and operational issues. A overriding concern is to increase the reliability of the supply of electric energy by decreasing the time it takes to restore power after an outage occurs. Outage management involves the identification of the location of outage and taking the necessary action or actions, such as switching steps or repair, to restore power as soon as possible to any affected customers. The proposed long term research project for the Computer Applications in Power System Operations Laboratory (CAPSOL) at Michigan Technological University involves the integration of numerical power system analysis, non-numerical power system data, and the resource base of personnel and equipment to create a comprehensive set of outage management techniques to optimize restoration efforts during and after a storm condition. Such research should provide an increased awareness of the contrasts between normal operations and storm operations and provide increased performance in utility reliability. The planning grant research activities involve three components: initial research work and laboratory development, travel, and proposal creation. Background literature review will be used to identify published algorithms for outage identification, restoration, and prioritization; to identify the previous approaches to integration o f intelligent system techniques to storm management issues; and to highlight the applications where intelligent system techniques can be either improved or increased in the storm management process. Research will focus on setting up a complete topological network analysis package and a power flow program. By combining the knowledge gained from previous work with utilities and the enhanced resources of the CAPSOL laboratory, initial storm management algorithms can be developed. The travel activities will permit interaction with experts in the power engineering field from utilities, vendors and other universities. The PI also plans to write proposals to support work on storm management issues seeking federal, state and industrial research support. ***
