Published by : International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT)

http://www.ijert.org ISSN: 2278-0181

Vol. 9 Issue 07, July-2020

Artificial Intelligence in the Field of Electrical

Engineering
Sesha Gopal S
Dept. of EEE
BMS Institute of Technology & Management
India

Abstract—This Electricity runs the world today. It is also about the pros and cons of artificial intelligence, we can
noteworthy that the world today will not run function if it is decide on how artificial intelligence can be integrated with
deprived of electricity. A power system can be considered as an electrical engineering and power systems in order to facilitate
interconnection of electrical components that are used to utilize a smarter system.
the power in an effective way and help in the transfer and
supply of the power to the consumers. There are a lot of aspects A. Pros of artificial intelligence:
that need to be considered while manufacturing components for • First, Reduction in human error: With the increase in
an electric power system as well as the maintenance of the said amount of data being supplied, artificial intelligence
power system. There is a possibility of human error that can
can completely nullify human error and thereby give
arise during the maintenance and manufacturing of parts as
well as ensuring the security of the system. A possible solution to a much more accurate result when compared to the
this comes in the form of artificial intelligence. Artificial results provided by humans. This is a huge advantage
intelligence can be visualized as an effort to emulate the ability as accuracy is very important in the field of electrical
of a human being to think rationally and process the engineering as one single mistake can not only
information available in order to reach conclusive results. This disrupt the power system but also lead to catastrophic
paper aims to study more about what artificial intelligence is results.
and how it can be used in the field of electrical engineering. • Safety of human labor: Another major advantage of
artificial intelligence is the fact that human beings do
Keywords—Artificial intelligence, electrical engineering,
power systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic. not have to directly interact with scenarios that can
be risky or pose a threat to the labor. In case of a fire
I. INTRODUCTION in an apartment, robots powered by AI can be used to
John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence in the navigate through the building and put out the fire,
year 1956 and defines it as “The science and engineering of thereby nullifying the risk to human life as well as
making intelligence machines”. This field of study came into accomplishing the task with a satisfactory outcome.
existence on the assumption that human intelligence can be • Repetition: There are a lot of tasks that need to be
described so precisely that it can be simulated by a machine. repeated in order to be completed. Tasks such as
Artificial intelligence is an emerging technology that not only sending the same email to a group of people or
studies the theory, technology and the application systems for installing a particular software on the system of each
simulating and extending human intelligence, but also develop and every employee’s computer system are
all of the above, involving various disciplines such as considered to be boring and tedious. Artificial
psychology, cognitive science, thinking, information science, intelligence can be used in order to tackle such tasks
system science and bio science. with ease, thereby not only completing the task but
Artificial intelligence has provided a great potential and also ensuring that human labor is not wasted on such
space for optimization in the field of electrical engineering. tasks. A possible area of application can be in the
This can not only bring about a significant improvement not manufacturing and automation of various electrical
only with regards to the economic aspects but also in the components.
safety and the actual control of the operation. Ever since • Speed of decision making: Since artificial
artificial intelligence reached a stage where it could be used in intelligence is ultimately carried out by machines, it
various fields in order to make work simpler, it has been used is generally faster. The main difference between
widely in various fields of life, primarily in robotics and artificial intelligence and human intelligence is that
computer programming. Recent studies and investigations human beings analyze all the factors pragmatically as
have shown that artificial intelligence can also be a viable well as emotionally and then come to a decision
option in the field of electrical engineering especially as a based on what that person feels is right. Therefore,
solution to some longstanding power system problems where the decision can vary wildly from person to person.
conventional methods experience some difficulty. Artificial intelligence on the other hand gives an
output considering all the factors based on how it has
II.PROS AND CONS OF ARTIFICIAL been programmed. This approach significantly
INTELLIGENCE speeds up the problem solving and decision making.
As an emerging technology, artificial intelligence has its fair This can prove to be extremely important in case of
share of advantages and disadvantages. By studying more

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Published by : International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT)
http://www.ijert.org ISSN: 2278-0181
Vol. 9 Issue 07, July-2020

power outages and disruptions in the power delivery suitable artificial intelligence in order to tackle real
to the consumers. life situations will take a lot of time to develop and
• Availability: Problems can occur without a warning. test.
It is imperative for a system to be able to tackle any Now that we have a clear understanding of the various
issue that can crop up at any time. Human beings pros and cons of artificial intelligence, we can delve more on
cannot be available 24X7 and in order to do so, how to integrate artificial intelligence into electrical
people need to work in shifts to satisfy the need of engineering and the various applications and problems that
supervision for the whole day. Artificial intelligence can be addressed as a result of this.
is available the whole day owing to the fact that it is
a computer program that analyzes the various inputs III. AI IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
being provided to the system. Robots and machines There are different types of artificial intelligence that can be
that make use of artificial intelligence do not tire like applied to a modern-day power system and they are:
humans thereby increasing the cumulative hours of • Expert System Techniques.
work put in as well. • Artificial Neural Networks.
Looking at the number of advantages that artificial • Fuzzy Logic Systems.
intelligence can bring to the table might be enough to A. Expert systems:
convince someone that it can be a viable option to be used in In simple terms, an expert system can be defined as a
the field of electrical engineering. But it is also important to computer system that incorporates the decision-making ability
understand the shortcomings of artificial intelligence in order of a human expert, which means these kinds of systems
to implement innovative solutions to overcome them. specialize in a particular field of study. This can also pose a
B. Cons of artificial intelligence: problem as these systems cannot handle new problems or
• The Unemployment: This is one of the most situations that can arise. Since expert systems are typically just
controversial points of focus when it comes to computer programs, they can be used in order to calculate and
whether artificial intelligence must be implemented determine parameters and values in the generation,
in various industries. There is a fraction of people transmission and the distribution of power.
who believe work will be made easier with the
adoption of artificial intelligence in a lot of fields but
there are people who believe that artificial
intelligence can replace human labour in these fields,
thereby eliminating the need of humans. This can
lead to unemployment and loss of pay to a lot of
people who depend on this work in order to pay for
their food and expenditure.
• Propagation of laziness: Artificial intelligence is not
only available 24x7 but also does not tire and
Fig-1: Block diagram of expert system
perform at peak efficiency all day. As discussed
above, this eliminates the need for human B. Artificial Neural Networks:
supervision as well, thereby making us complacent An artificial neural network is based on a collection of
and lazy as we feel that the artificial intelligence can interconnected nodes or units called artificial neurons, which
deal with the problems at hand. are actually modelled based on the biological neural networks
• Lack of emotional intelligence: As discussed earlier, present in the human body. The main goal of an ANN is to
artificial intelligence solves problems and makes emulate the behavior of a human brain and thereby solve
decisions much faster than human beings but this problems just like the human brain by employing various
comes at a cost. Humans think emotionally as well strategies such as decision-making and problem solving.
and a part of this goes into the decision-making There are various deviations of this such as computer vision
procedure as well but artificial intelligence does not and speech recognition.
consider this into its decision-making. Artificial ANN’s basically convert a set of inputs into a corresponding
intelligence just does as programmed and set of outputs by passing the input through a network of
programming of emotions will take a lot of study, neurons. Each neuron that is a part of the neural network
research and effort from scientists all over the world. produces its own output based on the input that is given to that
• Cost: Integrating artificial intelligence into an already neuron.
existing system not only consumes a lot of time and ANN’s find their application in power system stabilizers, load
effort but also costs a lot of money. This means that forecasting, load modelling and state estimation.
there is a requirement for a capital amount that needs
to be invested in order to make artificial intelligence
a viable option.
• Time of implementation: Due to a lack of extremely
skilled programmers and the difficulty in the
development of a satisfactory model, developing the

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Vol. 9 Issue 07, July-2020

• Planning of power system: Generation expansion

planning, power system reliability, transmission
expansion planning, and reactive power planning.
• Control of power system: Voltage control, stability
control, power flow control, and load frequency
control.
• Control of power plants.
• Automation of power system: Restoration,
management, fault diagnosis, and network security.
• Distribution systems: Planning and operation of
distribution systems, demand side response and
management, operation and control of smart grids,
and network configuration.
• Distributed generation applications: Distributed
generation planning, solar photovoltaic power plant
control, wind turbine plant control, and renewable
energy resources.
• Forecasting: short term load forecasting, long term
load forecasting, electricity market forecasting, solar
Fig-2: Block diagram of an ANN power forecasting, and wind power forecasting.
C. Fuzzy logic systems:
Fuzzy logic can be visualized as a many-valued logic, as
compared to Boolean logic which basically has just two values
for the output i.e. 0 and 1. Fuzzy logic gives the output in the
form of truth values that may be any real number between 0
and 1 as a way to incorporate the idea of partial truth. There
may be some cases where the output can be completely true or
completely false, but a majority of the cases have some degree
of truth or falsehood coupled with them. This is based on the
observation that people usually make decisions based on
imprecise and non-numerical information, therefore the name
fuzzy logic. Fig-4: Fuzzy logic in a transmission line
Fuzzy logic finds its application in the control of power
systems like voltage control, stability control, power flow Since electrical engineering is a highly specialized branch, it
control, stability analysis and enhancement, load forecasting requires the use of expert systems in order to solve problems
and performance improvement of transmission lines. by employing decision making, archiving knowledge, and
solving problems by the help of reasoning, judgement and
heuristics. Fuzzy logic systems can primarily be used in fault
diagnosis. Assume that a fault has occurred on the
transmission line. The fault detector can feed the information
of this fault into the fuzzy logic system. The fuzzy system
then processes this information in order to give us a crisp
output of what the fault is.
Artificial neural networks can be used in improving the
performance of the transmission lines. Various sensors can be
added to the transmission lines in order to constantly monitor
the environment and other ambient conditions. These
Fig-3: Block diagram of a fuzzy system conditions can then be fed into the artificial neural network in
order to process it and then change the line parameters in
IV. APPLICATIONS OF AI IN ELECTRICAL
order to improve the performance of the line. The
ENGINEERING
improvement in performance is directly proportional to the
As discussed, several problems in power systems cannot be
efficiency of the ANN. The efficiency and speed of operation
solved by conventional methods owing to the fact that the
of the ANN can be improved by increasing the number of
requirements for these methods to function are not feasible at
hidden neuron layers in the ANN.
that point in time. A few broad areas that artificial intelligence
It is pretty evident how much of an impact artificial
can possibly be used in are:
intelligence can have on power systems. The adoption of
• Operation of power system: Unit commitment,
artificial intelligence will make our existing systems efficient
hydro-thermal coordination, economic load dispatch,
and reliable.
maintenance scheduling, and load and power flow.

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Published by : International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT)
http://www.ijert.org ISSN: 2278-0181
Vol. 9 Issue 07, July-2020

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