As necessity for improvement in system operation demands the implementation of distribution automation, design of the protection system becomes more involved. Several goals of distribution automation -- improved customer reliability, reduced systems losses, and balancing of substation loading -- are dependent on the ability to perform automatic circuit reconfigurations. A prerequisite for implementing automatic circuit reconfiguration is that the protection system design must operate properly for all configurations.

An integrated expert system for the protection system design of interconnected distribution circuits has been developed using the DANE engineering workstation. The expert system incorporates the basic requirements and guidelines as specified by IEEE for protection system design. The expert system uses a relational database management system, integrates system data, and provides a graphical user interface. The expert system incorporates both procedural and declarative, or query, operating modes. Rules dealing with the coordination, placement and selection of protective devices are presented that are used to dynamically, incorporate expert knowledge into the knowledge base. The protection system designer controls which rules are implemented in the design.

An example protection system design is presented using the integrated expert system developed for DANE. The example problem consists of three interconnected distribution circuits. Dynamic knowledge, created by the expert system from the rules and system data, is used in the design. System data is presented pertaining to the circuits along with the created dynamic knowledge. The implemented rules dealing with the coordination, placement and selection of protective devices are presented, along with all associated parameter values. The final protection system design and results are presented in a research report.