Fault Location and Voltage Estimation in Transmission Systems by Evolutionary Algorithms

This paper aims at presenting the development and implementation of an approach to deal with fault location in transmission systems by Evolutionary Algorithms. The algorithm allows for the estimation of voltage sags and swells in non-monitored buses as well. An Evolutionary Strategy was applied to address the optimization problem, from the generation of a population of individuals that represent possible solutions to the problem to the evolutionary operators such as selection, mutation and crossover. Some variants of the basic approach were also considered in such a way to determine the fault location with better performance. A case study, based on the 30 bus IEEE study system, demonstrates the potential of the proposed methodology.