Optimal Placement of Current Measurement Units for Accurate and Smart Fault Location Purpose

This paper presents a fault location technique for transmission lines with minimum current measurement units. The proposed method used proper current ratios to find fault locations based on both Thevenin theory in faulty power networks and calculation of short circuit currents in each branch. These current ratios are extracted based on lowest sensitivity to Thevenin impedance variations of the network. Proposed algorithm compares current ratios in offline calculations with associated values collected by measurements with a lookup table mechanism. A similarity measure algorithm can find location of the fault including line number and the distance. A multi-objective optimization problem using Bees Algorithm (BA) is used to search monitoring points with minimum possible current measurements. Accuracy of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in a widely used multi-machine network of Western Systems Coordinating Council (WSCC).