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Environmental factors, such as weather, trees, and animals, are major causes of power outages in electric utility distribution systems. Of these factors, wind and lightning have the most significant impacts. The objective of this paper is to investigate models to estimate wind and lighting related outages. Such estimation models hold the potential for lowering operational costs and reducing customer downtime. This paper proposes an ensemble learning approach based on a boosting algorithm, AdaBoost^+, for estimation of weather-caused power outages. Effectiveness of the model is evaluated using actual data, which comprised of weather data and recorded outages for four cities of different sizes in Kansas. The proposed ensemble model is compared with previously presented regression, neural network, and mixture of experts models. The results clearly show that AdaBoost^+ estimates outages with greater accuracy than the other models for all four data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper extends previous research on using a Bayesian network model to investigate impacts of time (month) and weather (number of fair weather days in a week) on animal-related outages in distribution systems. Outage history (outages in the previous week) is included as an additional input to the model, and inputs and outputs are classified systematically to reduce errors in estimates of outputs. Conditional probability table obtained from the historical data are used to estimate weekly animal-related outages which is followed by a Monte Carlo simulation to find estimates of mean and confidence limits for monthly animal-related outages. Comparison of results obtained for four cities of different sizes in Kansas with those obtained using a hybrid wavelet/neural network model shows consistency between the two models. The methodology presented in this paper is simple to implement and useful for the utilities for year-end analysis of the outage data to identify specific reliability-related concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Power distribution systems play an important role in modern society. When distribution system outages occur, fast and proper restorations are crucial to improve the quality of services and customer satisfaction. Proper usages of outage root cause identification tools are often essential for effective outage restorations. This paper reports on the investigation and results of two popular classification methods: logistic regression (LR) and artificial neural network (ANN) applied on power distribution fault cause identification. LR is seldom used in power distribution fault diagnosis, while ANN has been extensively used in power system reliability researches. This paper discusses the practical application problems, including data insufficiency, imbalanced data constitution, and threshold setting that are often faced in power distribution fault cause identification problems. Two major distribution fault types, tree and animal contact, are used to illustrate the characteristics and effectiveness of the investigated techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]