AUTOMATED UNDERGROUND RESIDENTIAL DISTRIBUTION DESIGN .1. CONCEPTUAL DESIGN

The design of the electrical supply system for new residential develop ments (electrical plat design) is an everyday task for electric utilit y engineers. Presently this task is carried out manually resulting in an overdesigned, costly, and nonstandardized solution. As an ill-struc tured and open-ended problem, the plat design is difficult to automate with conventional approaches such as operational research or CAD. An additional complexity in automating the plat design is imposed by the need to process spatial data such as circuits' maps, records, and cons truction plans. The proposed Intelligent Decision Support System for A utomated Electrical Plat Design (IDSS for AEPD) is an engineering tool , aimed at automating plat design. The IDSS for AEPD combines the func tionality of a geographically referenced database with the sophisticat ion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lo deal with the complexity inhere nt in this type of problem. This paper presents the concept of the AEP D tool currently under development at Puget Sound Power & Light Co. (P SPL) and the University of Washington (UW). The implementation issues and results are presented in a companion paper [2].