An Examination of Expert System Uses in Power Plants

Power generation control becomes progressively more complex as equipment dimensions and power output capabilities increase in the industry.Professional operators who understand plant systems need to be employed because they must make various operational decisions throughout the power plant.The modern power industry faces a primary challenge owing to the shortage of professional plant operators with proper skills and experience.The field of plant automation now focuses on artificial intelligence expert systems because these programs specifically replicate the operations of professional plant operators.This study conducts an analysis of numerous expert system implementations occurring in electric power plants.The evaluation demonstrates how expert system technology progressed through its combination with modern approaches that include fuzzy, neural network, machine vision, and data gathering systems.The use of expert systems to conduct plant fault diagnosis and maintenance enables a decreased workload for professionals as well as plant operators.The applications of expert systems include data processing as well as alarm reduction and schedule optimization and operator training and evaluation functions.The traditional rule-based methods combined with contemporary approaches which include neural networks, fuzzy logic, machine vision, databases and simulators have expanded expert systems' capacity to solve problems.