Voltage Instability Detection Using Neural Networks

The explosive growth in decision-support systems over the past 30 years has yielded numerous “intelligent” systems that have often produced less-than-stellar results (Michalewicz Z. et al., 2005). The increasing trend in developing intelligent systems based on neural networks is attributed to their capability of learning nonlinear problems offline with selective training, which can lead to sufficiently accurate online response. Artificial neural networks have been used to solve many problems obtaining outstanding results in various application areas such as power systems. Power systems applications can benefit from such intelligent systems; particularly for voltage stabilization, where voltage instability in power distribution systems could lead to voltage collapse and thus power blackouts. This article presents an intelligent system which detects voltage instability and classifies voltage output of an assumed power distribution system (PDS) as: stable, unstable or overload. The novelty of our work is the use of voltage output images as the input patterns to the neural network for training and generalizing purposes, thus providing a faster instability detection system that simulates a trained operator controlling and monitoring the 3-phase voltage output of the simulated PDS.