Wide-Area Fault Location in Transmission Power System Considering Measurement Uncertainty

Abstract

Fault location has significant importance in energy management system and has been used for many years. Recently, wide-area fault location using phasor measurement units (PMU) has attracted many attentions. However, measurement uncertainties decrease the accuracy of available methods. In this paper, a wide-area fault location method based on weighted maximum exponential squares (WMES) algorithm is proposed which has high robustness against measurement uncertainties. In this method, the measurements are weighted appropriately based on the uncertainty propagation theorem. Using WMES algorithm guarantees the robustness of the proposed method against bad data resulted from measurement uncertainty. In the previous methods, only voltage measurements are used in fault location; however, the formulation in this paper is developed to consider the current measurements provided by PMUs in addition to voltage ones for detecting the fault location. Results of simulation on the standard IEEE 57-bus network illustrates the efficiency of proposed fault location method based on the WMES compared to the other methods.