Design and development of a software for fault diagnosis in radial distribution networks

This paper presents an on-line fault diagnosis software in primary distribution feeders. The software is written in DELPHI and C++ languages and its interaction with the operator is made in a very friendly environment. The input data are the currents of the feeder per phase, monitored only in the substation. An artificial immune system was developed using the negative selection algorithm to detect and classify the faults. The fault location was identified by a genetic algorithm which is triggered by negative selection algorithm. The main application of the software is to assist in the operation during a fault, and supervise the protection system. A 103-bus non-transposed real feeder is used to evaluate the proposed software. The results show that the software is effective for diagnosing all types of faults involving short-circuits and it has great potential for online applications.