Validation and Verification of Knowledge-Based Systems for Power System Control Centres

Abstract

During the last years, electrical utilities began to install intelligent applications in order to assist Control Centres operators. The SPARSE is a Knowledge-Based System used in the Portuguese Transmission Network for operator assistance in incident analysis and power restoration. The Verification and Validation (V&V) process must assure the reliability of these applications, even under incident conditions. This paper addresses the Validation and Verification of Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) in general, focussing particularly on the V&V of SPARSE. Validation and Verification are presented in a complementary perspective, stressing its relation with the KBS developing stages. VERITAS is an automatic verification tool initially developed to verify SPARSE Knowledge Base. Although its initial goal was the SPARSE verification, the tool was developed with generic verification purposes and domain independent approach. Hence it is able to perform knowledge base structural analysis allowing the detection of knowledge anomalies at low cost, especially with big knowledge bases. VERITAS is currently being used in the verification of several Knowledge Based and Data Mining systems.