Learning Lessons Intelligently in the Electric Power Industry

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EPRI (formerly the Electric Power Research Institute), behalf of its member companies worldwide, has initiated a strategic research program in Human Performance (HP), designed to enhance HP management by development of approaches and tools for anticipating, monitoring, and addressing factors with adverse impact on human productivity and reliability in workplace settings. This program emphasizes proactive intervention strategies, featuring intelligent, real-time semi-automated and automated tools to identify early indicator patterns of worker, workplace, and organizational factors associated with HP problems. One major programmatic thrust is directed toward developing approaches for making optimal use of the vast amount of text and quantitative data, both event and operational, routinely recorded by EPRI’s member companies (electric utilities and other energy industry settings), as well as the informal lessons learned (undocumented knowledge) of experienced workers.. combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer simulation may be used to implement a system that would automate the assembly, organization, and evaluation of such data, answer user queries, and even suggest unanticipated relationships. This suggested integrated approach could use query-driven simulation, combining two common approaches to artificial intelligence: model-based and casebased reasoning.