Data-driven exploratory models of an electric distribution network for fault prediction and diagnosis

Data-driven models are becoming of fundamental importance in electric distribution networks to enable predictive maintenance, to perform effective diagnosis and to reduce related expenditures, with the final goal of improving the electric service efficiency and reliability to the benefit of both the citizens and the grid operators themselves. This paper considers a dataset collected over 6 years in a real-world medium-voltage distribution network by the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. A transparent, exploratory, and exhaustive data-mining workflow, based on data characterisation, time-windowing, association rule mining, and associative classification is proposed and experimentally evaluated to automatically identify correlations and build a prognostic–diagnostic model from the SCADA events occurring before and after specific service interruptions, i.e., network faults. Our results, evaluated by both data-driven quality metrics and domain expert interpretations, highlight the capability to assess the limited predictive capability of the SCADA events for medium-voltage distribution networks, while their effective exploitation for diagnostic purposes is promising.