ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE IN ELECTRIC-POWER SYSTEMS - A SURVEY OF THE JAPANESE INDUSTRY

The major work on the theory and application of artificial intelligenc e (AI), which includes expert systems, is going on in the United State s, Europe and Japan. The Japanese electric utility industry, manufactu rers, universities and the government have taken a focused goal-orient ed approach in this regard. The author has studied the Japanese involv ement in this field and visited eight Japanese R&D laboratories, where he discussed the AI and expert system related activities (in the powe r industry). This paper provides a comprehensive look at the combined Japanese effort. The current topics of interest are: (i) AI and its ap plication in power engineering; (ii) problems in AI applications devel opment and their solutions; (iii) practical system examples; and (iv) AI applications to power systems of the future. Out of the 97 papers c ited in this paper, 10 were produced by electric utilities, 10 by manu facturers, 17 by universities and 60 were joint efforts. This shows th e level and importance of joint collaborative research among the Japan ese researchers. Even though they are working on many theorectical asp ects of the AI technology including automated knowledge acquisition an d verification, they still use significant amount of theoretical work done in the United States for successful prototyping of AI based tools . It is, however, safe to say that the use of AI tools in the Japanese electric power industry is far more widespread than what is seen in t he United States or in Europe.