Intelligent system for detecting “hidden” errors in protection settings

Abstract

Due to many developments taking place within the electricity supply industry, the network and its operation has grown ever more in recent years, which brings significant challenges for power system protection engineers. Apart from the significant efforts that are required to ensure that the protection setting process is effective, work also needs to be carried out to check the validity of the settings after initial calculation and application. However, solely relying on personnel and procedures to assess the validity of the protection relay setting files may occasionally result in a hidden error (or errors) remaining undetected until an in-service mal-operation event is experienced. This may bring significant consequences, in terms of economic costs, potential safety hazards and damage to the reputation of the utility company. This paper will present the initial research of making use of artificial intelligence technology (expert system) to help protection engineers validate the protection settings. Existing expert systems for protection settings applications will be reviewed and a new intelligent system that can open a setting file and interrogate the protection functions and settings in the file will be introduced. The advantages of this novel intelligent tool over existing protection setting expert systems will be discussed.Index Terms-Artificial intelligence, expert systems, power system, power system protection, power system relaying.

Enabling Efficient Engineering Processes and Automated Analysis for Power Protection Systems

“…For example, one of the main motivations of the work presented in this paper is the challenge of implementing an intelligent system for protection settings validation [33], [34], that must operate using a large variety of proprietary settings data formats. The settings validation system introduced in [33] contains a rule-based module based upon rules that have been predefined from a utility's setting policies and from experts' knowledge that can characterize the validity of protection settings.…”

Standardization of power system protection settings using IEC 61850 for improved interoperability

“…The work presented in this paper is part of the research as described in [3] which proposes a rule-based intelligent system to detect hidden errors in protection settings.…”

“…The system proposed in [3] automates the setting verification process and aims to increase the reliability of the validating results. The use of the standardized approach described in this paper simplifies the task of developing and maintaining the validation system.…”

“…This avoids many nested "if-then" statements, provides separation between rules and data, and can be combined with a larger expert system such as the one described in [3]. Other advantages of using rule-based reasoning are elaborated in [3].…”

“…The text files are exported subsequently in System Configuration description Language (SCL) [1] format which is formally defined. The SCL-based protection setting files are ready for multiple applications, such as: importing into a protection simulation system to validate protection operation [2]; a protection setting error detection system, as described in [3]; integration with a smart grid data management system; and for enforcing protection setting interoperability. Among these applications, this paper will focus on applying the IEC 61850-based data model to achieve protection setting interoperability.…”