A Brief History of Application of Artificial Intelligence to Power Systems

This paper tries to summarize the attempts to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to power systems, particularly power system planning and operations which require significant computer analysis. Although the term AI was coined earlier, this paper considers the beginning to be in the 1980s when the first expert systems were applied to power engineering. Of course, many of the analytical techniques applied can be traced to earlier statistical analysis and pattern recognition. The concept of expert systems was very much in line with the concept of AI. The various methods for applying AI to power systems are traced here. The historical journey in this paper closes with the great explosion of AI applications in the last decade when almost all power system analysis is trying to utilize AI techniques to help the transformation of the power system into a more efficient and carbon-free system. This proliferation of research in the application of AI is covered in the other papers in this series.