Evolutionary algorithm for protection relay setting coordination

The protection relay setting coordination manages the protection relay operations to clear a system fault in several steps of contingence. Relays which are mis-coordinated will trip out unnecessary circuits resulting in electric supply interruption. The time coordination method (TCM) which formulates the coordination of relay settings into a set of constraint equations and objective function is developed to manage the relay settings. The protection system coordination is a highly constrained optimization problem and conventional methods fail in searching for the global optimum. This paper presents the application of evolutionary algorithm (EA) in optimizing the protection relay setting coordination in comparison with other intelligent methods. The result shows that evolutionary algorithm is an effective tool to search the optimum protection setting with maximum constraint satisfactions