To meet the fast growing national economic level and the industrial advance, and to increase the people’s living standard, Taipower is taking its full effort to enhance the network infrastructure to provide more reliable and much higher quality electricity to the people. , In fact, distribution system is the most downstream level of the electric power system, and is directly related to the customer’s electricity consumption. However, due to its wide spread in area and easily affected by nature phenomena such as weather, electric network fault is unavoidable. When fault occurs, it is our aim to locate and isolate the fault in the shortest possible time, such that power could be restored quickly.
　
　　Due to the fast growing economy that causes the highly concentrated population in the metropolitan area, traffic jams would occur very often. Whenever outages occur, it is nearly impossible to reach the fault location quickly to carry out emergency repair. The duration of power outage would be extended and induces many complaints from the customers. Therefore, to reduce the outage time and the affected area are the essential points for improvement on distribution power system.
　
　　Known as DAS, the Distribution Automation System, of Northen Taipei Branch uses the latest technology, which fully integrates the distribution system, communication system and computer control system into a comprehensive control and monitoring system. Not only does it includes functions such as distribution feeder automation, distribution system analysis, customer-end management, but also can automatically perform the fault detection, isolation, and restoration of power to the healthy area rapidly.
　
　　Taipower’s distribution automation system has leapt forward to a new era since the system has been successfully implemented. Indeed, in the future, other districts would take this system as a reference for the implemention of their distribution automation system .
 
 

1. To reduce outage duration and affected area and increase reliability of power supply.

2. To enhance customer-end management and upgrade electric power supply efficiency.

3. To computerize the supervisory control of distribution system and establish comprehensive information for operation.

4. To promote the technical level of distribution system operation and enhance customer-end service.
 
 

1. Greatly reduce the outage duration and affected area, increase the reliability of power supply
 
　　The system has introduced advanced distribution equipment for installation into distribution system, such as automatic line switch, terminal units, and so on. It also integrates and utilizes computer software, hardware, communication technique, for the construction of the DAS system, which consists of functions such as automatic monitoring and control, fault detection, automatic isolation and restoration, and remote line switch control. When faults occurs, the system can rapidly carry out fault isolation, load transfer, and restore the electricity to the healthy area so that the inconvenience to the customers caused by power interruption can be reduced to a minimal level. Since the completion of the system, it has actually helped the dispatchers to understand and effectively monitor/control the status of the power distribution system in realtime.
　
(1) Monitoring Distribution System Operation
By using Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) function to alert the operator when electric network feeder become abnormal so that the operator could take appropriate actions to avoid further trouble from happening. Thus increase the reliability of power supply.

(2) Reducing the outage affected area
By using the Fault Detection Isolation and Restoration (FDIR) function, when fault occurred on feeder, the system could locate and isolate the faulted area and transfer the load to other healthy feeder. Thus it reduces the blackout area to the neighboring area of the fault as well as the number of affected customers.

(3) Reducing outage duration
The detection and remote control function could shorten the outage duration by restore power to upstream of the fault. Also, by load transfer operation, the downstream power restoration time could be reduced. The outage duration is greatly reduced.

2. Computerize the supervisory control of distribution system and establish comprehensive information of operation

(1) During planned outage, the SCADA function could be used to remotely control the ON/OFF of automatic line switches. This could reduce manpower and increase work safety.

(2) The Source Database (Source DB) provided basic imformation of the distribution system, together with the Real-time Database（RTDB） established from the real time data obtained from FRTU and FTU, a complete database could be established, such that the dispatcher could monitor all different operation conditions of the distribution feeders.

3.Upgrade technical level of distribution technique and improve customer services.

　　The system, providing a comprehensive coverage from substations, feeders, to the customer-end, has successfully integrated computer system, communication system and automation system techniques for applications in distribution system. The result of advanced hardware and software functions together with the knowledge and intelligence not only greatly improve the technology level of distribution operation but also enhance customer services and elevate the company image.
　
　

　　Economic is the life of the country and electricity is an essential key for economic growth. In facing ever changing and competition of the overall economic environment and dereguration ofelectric utilities, Taipower is endeavored to satisfy various needs of the customer and to continuously enhance the quality of services as well as power supply. Indeed, that is to ensure the eternal operation of industries in Taiwan.
　
　　Aiming to perfection and looking for challenge, Taipower Northen Taipei Branch has been pushing forward the DAS system for many years. Using the various latest automation techniques in the system planning and integration, the system covers different distribution levels such as substations, feeders and customer level. It is a comprehensive function of distribution automatic system, which attracts much attention from the power industries.
　
　　Due to the lack of a similar fully developed system throughout the power industry, it must be either developed as a new product or dramatically modified on existing product in order to meet the user requirements written on the DAS’s specification. As a result, various difficulties arise continuously throughout the erection period. However, with Taipower’s close monitoring on the requirement to meet the specification and insisting on quality, the contractor has also invested huge resources and manpower to overcome all difficulties jointly with Taipower. All tests required by the specification has finally been completed. Taipower personnel involved has also gained a lot of precious experience throughout the process. In fact, these personnel as well as their experience could be of reference to other districts for the DAS system.