The automation of public electricity distribution has developed very rapidly in the past few years. The same basis can be used to develop new intelligent applications for electricity distribution networks in industrial plants. Many new applications have to be introduced because of the different environment and needs in industrial sector. The paper includes a system description of industrial electric system management. The paper discusses on the requirements of new applications and methods that can be used to solve problems in the areas of distribution management and condition monitoring of industrial networks.

Industrial plants have put continuous pressure on the advanced process automation. However, there has not been so much focus on the automation of the electricity distribution networks. Although, the uninterrupted electricity distribution is one basic requirement for the process. A disturbance in electricity supply causing the “downrun” of the process may cost huge amount of money. Thus the intelligent management of electricity distribution including, for example, preventive condition monitoring and on-line reliability analysis has a great importance. Nowadays the above needs have aroused the increased interest in the electricity distribution automation of industrial plants.

The automation of public electricity distribution has developed very rapidly in the past few years. Very promising results has been gained, for example, in decreasing outage times of customers. However, the same concept as such cannot be applied in the field of industrial electricity distribution, although the bases of automation systems are common. The infrastructures of different industry plants vary more from each other as compared to the public electricity distribution, which is more homogeneous domain. The automation devices, computer systems, and databases are not in the same level and the integration of them is more complicated.