Integrated expert system applied to the analysis of non-technical losses in power utilities

The detection of non-technical losses (NTLs), in most papers, commonly deals with the utilization of the registered consumption for each customer; besides, some researchers used the economic activity, the active/reactive ratio and the contract power. Currently, utility company databases store enormous amounts of information on both installations and customers: consumption, technical information on the measure equipment, documentation, inspections results, commentaries of inspectors, etc. In this paper, an integrated expert system (IES) for the analysis and classification of all the available useful information of the customer is presented. Customer classification identifies the presence of an NTL and the problem type. This IES include several modules: text mining module for analysis of inspector commentaries and extraction of additional information on the customer, data mining module to draw up the rules that determine the customer estimate consumption, and the Rule Based Expert System module to analyze each customer using the results of the text and data mining modules. This IES is used with real data extracted from Endesa company databases. Endesa is the most important power distribution company in Spain, and one of the most significant companies of Europe. This IES is used in the test phase by human experts in the Endesa company. In this phase, the IES is used as a Decision Support System (DSS), as it contains another module which provides a report with additional information about the customer and a summarized result that the inspectors can use to reach a decision. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.