An electric power distribution utility is responsible for providing energy to consumers in a continuous and stable way. Failures in the electrical power system reduce the reliability indexes of the grid, directly harming its performance. For this reason, there is a need for failure prediction to reestablish power in the shortest possible time. Considering an evaluation of the number of failures over time, this paper proposes performing failure prediction during the first year of the pandemic in Brazil (2020) to verify the feasibility of using time series forecasting models for fault prediction. The long short-term memory (LSTM) model will be evaluated to obtain a forecast result that an electric power utility can use to organize maintenance teams. The wavelet transform has shown itself to be promising in improving the predictive ability of LSTM, making the wavelet LSTM model suitable for the study at hand. The assessments show that the proposed approach has better results regarding the error in prediction and has robustness when statistical analysis is performed.
Keywords: electrical power grids; fault forecasting; long short-term memory; time series forecasting; wavelet transform.