Distribution system reliability through reconfiguration, fault location, isolation and restoration

The management of electricity distribution has to cope with rapid changes in the business environment, due to the liberalization in the electrical energy market. The main goal for the utilities is to reduce their operating costs to get ahead of competition. One popular strategy is to increase the degree of reliability of distribution system. The handling of network failures (e.g. short circuits, earth faults) offers a lot of possibilities for automation. The main tasks are fault localization, fault isolation and system restoration. The network operator needs excellent knowledge about the controlled network area to perform these tasks efficiently. In this paper a fault management system is described which enhances the reliability of the system through reconfiguration, the fault localization and the determination of isolation and restoration measures to relief the operator from these demanding tasks during network failures.