An immune system inspired clustering and classification method to detect critical areas in electrical power networks

Identifying critical, failure prone areas in a power system network are often a difficult and computationally intensive task. Artificial Immune System (AIS) algorithms have been shown to be capable of generalization and learning to identify previously unseen patterns. In this paper, a method is developed that uses artificial immune system classification and clustering algorithms to identify critical areas in the network. The algorithm identifies areas of the power system network that are prone to voltage collapse and areas with overloaded lines. The applicability of AIS for this particular task is demonstrated on test electrical power system networks. Its accuracy is compared with an optimised support vector machine (SVM) algorithm and k nearest neighbours algorithm (kNN) across 3 different power system networks. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.