Association rule mining application to diagnose smart power distribution system outage root cause

Smart grid has been introduced to address power distribution system challenges. In conventional power distribution systems, when a power outage happens, the maintenance team tries to find the outage cause and mitigate it. After this, some information is documented in a dataset called the outage dataset. If the team can estimate the outage cause before searching for it, the restoration time will be reduced. In line with smart grid concepts, an association rule-based method is presented in this paper to find the outage cause. To do this, we have first combined outage, load, and weather datasets and extracted features. Then, for every cause, the records are labelled main class or others. The association rules are extracted and evaluated. Through these rules, one can determine if the outage has happened because of a fault in a certain piece of equipment or not. Doing so alongside using smart devices may lead to reliability enhancement.