Application of simulated annealing to power system protection assessment

Simulated annealing has been applied to find the critical energy in an energy-based power system protection assessment algorithm. This critical energy is the minimum potential energy on surfaces defined by protection operating characteristics. Simulated annealing converges reliably, even though the feasible region is non-convex. Convergence may be quite slow though. An adaptation which significantly improves the convergence rate by selectively suppressing the random direction is proposed and illustrated