No abstract

Fault location identification is an important task to provide reliable service to the customer. Most existing artificial intelligence methods such as neural network, fuzzy logic, and support vector machine (SVM) focus on identifying the fault type, section, and distance separately. Furthermore, studies on fault type identification are focused on overhead transmission systems and not on underground distribution systems. In this paper, a fault location method in the distribution system is proposed using SVM, addressing the limitations of existing methods. Support vector classification (SVC) and regression analysis are performed to locate the fault. The method uses the voltage sag data during a fault measured at the primary substation. The type of fault is identified using SVC. The fault resistance and the voltage sag for the estimated fault resistance are identified using support vector regression (SVR) analysis. The possible faulty sections are identified from the estimated voltage sag data and ranked using the Euclidean distance approach. The proposed method identifies the fault distance using SVR analysis. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed using Malaysian distribution system of 40 buses. Test results show that the proposed method gives reliable fault location.

Support vector machine (SVM) is a novel machine for data analysis and has advantageous characteristic of good generalization. Because of this characteristic, SVM is used in this work for fault classification and diagnosis in distribution systems. This work proposes an effective fault location method using SVM to identify the fault type, faulty section, and fault distance. The classification and regression analysis of the SVM are performed to locate a fault. The proposed method utilizes the voltage sag magnitude and angle measured at the primary substation of a distribution system. First, the fault type is identified using oneversus-one concept of support vector classification. The next step identifies the faulty section by calculating fault resistance, finding possible faulty sections and ranking the possible sections. Finally, the fault distance is identified using support vector regression analysis. The performance of the proposed method is tested using SaskPower distribution system from Canada having 20 line sections. Test cases are carried out under various fault scenarios considering the fault type and fault resistance. The results of fault distance are compared for different kernel functions, and the most accurate kernel is chosen. Test results show that the proposed method obtains reliable fault location.

Various fault location methods have been developed in the past to identify the faulty phase, fault type, faulty section, and distance. However, this identification is commonly conducted in a separate manner. An effective fault location should be able to identify all of these at the same time. Therefore, in this work, a method using a support vector machine (SVM) to identify the fault type, faulty section, and distance considering the faulty phase is proposed. The proposed method uses voltage sag magnitude of the distribution system as the main feature for the SVM to identify faults. The fault type is classified using a directed acyclic graph SVM. The possible faulty sections are identified by estimating the fault resistance using support vector regression and matching the voltage sag data in the database with the actual voltage sag data. The most possible faulty sections are ranked using ranking analysis. The fault distance for the possible faulty sections is then identified using support vector regression analysis and its overfitting or underfitting issues are addressed by the proper selection of a regularization parameter. The feasibility of the proposed method was tested on an actual Malaysian distribution system. The results of faulty phase, fault type, faulty section, and fault distance are analyzed. The performance of the proposed method is compared with various other intelligent methods such as the artificial neural network, deep neural network, extreme learning machine, and kriging method. The test results indicate that the faulty phase and fault type yield 100% accurate results. All the faulty sections are identified and the proposed method obtains reliable fault location.

This paper proposes a nonlinear analysis of voltage sag magnitude and angle for fault distance calculation in distribution system. The method first identifies the fault section. Then, a rank approach is followed to identify and prioritize the faulty section. Later, the fault distance is calculated by creating a second order polynomial passing through the fault node. The testing is carried out in an actual distribution system of an electrical utility in Malaysia with 37 nodes. The test results show that the proposed fault distance gives very small percentage error.