An Analytic Method for Power System Fault Diagnosis Employing Topology Description

When a fault occurs in a power system, fault section estimation is the primary premise for troubleshooting and power recovery, and an effective fault diagnosis system will play a big role in decision making. However, the topology information is not well employed in existing fault diagnosis methods, and it is complex and time consuming to analyze the relationship between the protective devices and the sections. In this paper, a novel analytic method which employs topology description is proposed for fault diagnosis. The topology descriptions of the sections and the protective devices are firstly established according to the network structure, and based on which the operating logic and the cooperative relationship of the protective devices can be easily analyzed by matrix operation. Considering the factors of logic error and communication error, the fault diagnosis problem is formulated as an integer programming problem and can be solved by intelligent algorithm. The case studies of different power systems show that the proposed method can quickly identify the fault section, even with the abnormal operation or error alarm of protective devices.