Abstract:In this paper, a novel perturbed particle swarm optimization (PPSO) algorithm is investigated to improve the performance of a support vector machine (SVM) for short-circuit fault diagnosis in power distribution systems.In the proposed PPSO algorithm, the velocity of each particle is perturbed whenever the particles strike into a local optimum, in order to achieve a higher quality solution to optimization problems. Furthermore, the concept of proposed perturbation is applied to three variants of PSO, and improved corresponding algorithms are named perturbed C-PSO (PC-PSO), perturbed T-PSO (PT-PSO), and perturbed K-PSO (PK-PSO). For the purpose of fault diagnosis, the timedomain reflectometry (TDR) method with pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) excitation is considered to generate the necessary fault simulation data set. The proposed approaches are tested on a typical two-lateral radial distribution network.