An Intelligent System for Operators Performance Multicriteria Evaluation of Distribution Networks

– The operators play a important role in the distribution system control centers, especially during network contingencies. In these situations, the operators have to quickly restore the service and mitigate the impact of a failure on the electrical networks. The utilities need to know how efficiently the operators have executed their maneuvers and whether they are following the company proceedings. Thus, it is paramount to the utilities to have computational tools to evaluate operator performance. The development of this evaluation system is not usually discussed in the literature, whose focus is on developing computational tools for operator training and system operation simulators. Hence, we developed a computational system to evaluate the operator performance of distribution networks, taking the operator’s past actions and their impact on the company’s economic and technical indexes into account. This paper’s main contribution lies in proposing a multicriteria methodology and the computational model, based on an expert system, to assess the distribution network operator performance, considering 13 technical and economic criteria. The obtained results, by using real data from a Brazilian utility, present not only the operator’s global performance but also which criteria the operator has to improve, when past contingencies are analyzed.