1

Abstract A comparison of results between two different

methods of fault location for radial distribution networks
with a single measurement point is presented. A
parametric short circuit phasor simulation is conducted
for three different distribution circuits with the same
topology, to calculate the fault data at the measurement
point for equally spaced faults. Fault distances are then
calculated using a reactance algorithm and a support
vector machine and the results compared.
Keywords Fault location, distribution networks,
nomographs, support vector machines.

Introduction.

The use of fault location techniques is a present
requirement of the smart grid enabled distribution
management systems. The management strategies used in such
management systems call for the use of concepts like service
continuity, quality of service, reliability etc in the modern
interpretation of the role of the electric power systems which
implies an improvement in the precision of the fault location
methods used in distribution systems. Such fault location
methods are absolutely necessary since they make the job of
fault detection and elimination, easier and significantly
decreases the time used for such tasks. .[1]
Several techniques like reactance algorithms, travelling
wave, high frequency components, computational intelligence
etc, have been used to solve the problem of fault location in
electric power systems. [2] [3-8]. Most of these techniques
were developed for power transmission lines because of their
higher power levels, larger sizes, homogeneity, simpler
topology, etc.
Transmission lines carry higher power levels than any
other so their faults tend to have the worst, system
wide, consequences and are usually responsible for
affecting large amounts of users.
The distances in transmission lines range from several
dozens to a few hundred kilometers, longer than the
distances in any distribution lines.[5, 9-10]
Transmission lines are usually homogeneous, fully
transposed, topologically simple etc making them especially
suited for relatively simple and economic solutions in terms of
measurement resources and computing power. Reactance
algorithms like that developed by Takagi et al[2] which can be
used to obtain error levels under 2% whenever an adequate

Gonzlez Gmez Abel, works for Megger, LTD, in Toronto, Canada. (e-
mail: abel.gonzalez@megger.com)

estimation of the current and voltage phasors is made are an
example of the kind of relatively simple and economic
solutions mentioned before. Other reactance algorithms have
been developed that use measurement at both sides of the line
provide a higher precision but are not so simple to implement
and the cost of implementation is definitely higher. However
their use is recommended whenever possible.
For distribution systems such general solutions are yet to
be found. The reasons for the former are the following: [9, 11-
12]

Distribution lines are usually non homogeneous.
The topology of distribution lines is not simple which
creates great problems for fault location methods using
data from only one line terminal.
The existence of variable loads between the fault
locators or data registering equipment and the fault
itself.
Fault locators or data registering equipment are usually
not located directly on the lines but on the line feeders
makes the evaluation of the different contributions to
the fault even harder.
The relatively high influence of the fault resistance and
the grounding method in distribution networks over the
short circuit currents and voltages.
In most cases it is impossible to obtain fault data
directly from the faulted branch of the circuit.
As opposed to transmission lines, distribution lines
usually feed relatively small loads so the budget
fraction devoted to measurement equipment in such
lines is small. The consequence is that the equipment in
such lines is usually limited to power meters, low
spectrum overcurrent devices and reclosers,
sectionalizers and fuses connected downstream.

As a result the most diverse and simple and ineffective
techniques have been employed as a fault location method in
distribution lines such as[11]:

Restoration through switching.
Restoration through recloser operation.
Indication through fuse and fault locator operation.
Downed wires, customer calls, maps.
Relay targets.
DC thumping of underground circuits.
Smelling burnt cables.

However the power market deregulation that has opened the
distribution market to different utilities which are now very
Abel Gonzlez Gmez, member IEEE.
A Comparison of Two Data Intensive Methods
for Fault Location in Distribution Systems.


2
interested in decreasing the downtimes associated to faults and
increasing the reliability and the power quality as a
distinguishing feature of their operation. As a result an
increasing interest in fault location methods for distribution
systems has occurred specially in the last decade.

The characteristics of distribution systems mentioned above
have made a unified approach for the solution of the fault
location problem very difficult. This is the reason for the great
diversity of methods found in the literature to deal with this
problem which is a computational intensive one when it is
looked from the Substation Management system perspective.
Such methods can be classified in the following groups:
1. Fault loop impedance calculation algorithms.
Nomographs.
2. Statistical methods.
3. Hybrid methods.
4. Artificial intelligence methods e.g. neural networks,
neuro fuzzy systems, genetic algorithms.
5. Matching.
The difficulties associated with the wide use of artificial
intelligence methods in the past were usually associated to the
computational complexity of the distribution network itself
which made it very hard to obtain a training data set with high
accuracy and which contains enough test cases. The
improvements in the quality of the power system simulation
tools, the increasing computational power and lower price of
even desktop hardware capable of performing such
simulations have put this tools within the grasp of the
Distribution Management Systems making their use a real
possibility. Also the use of computational intelligence
methods has been limited in scope because of the inherent
difficulty in the interpretation of the results.
However, it is the perception of such methods that has limited
its widespread use in utilities around the world. It has been the
experience of the author that there is a generalized view in the
utilities sector that artificial intelligence methods lie within the
realm of the fantastic and that their place is in research labs or
in the academic world.
This paper shows a comparison between the results obtained
by using two of the aforementioned approaches. First the
results of fault location using nomographs is presented. Then
the results of fault location using a combination of an artificial
neural network ANN and a support vector machine, SVM. The
simulation of several real cases of distribution networks is
used to benchmark the results of the different methods used.
Matlab/Simulinnk/Power Systems Blockset simulations of
those networks are used to provide the training cases.
I. NOMOGRAPHS
The use of nomographs has been recommended for fault
location on distribution lines.[11] A nomograph is defined
as[11] A graph that plots measured fault location versus
actual fault location by compensating for known system
errors. The definition implies that a short circuit calculation
program can be used to simulate faults along the lines and use
the resulting fault voltage and phasors to calculate the fault
distance using some fault location algorithm.
Then plotting the calculated fault distance versus the
simulation parameter(the distance to the simulated fault) a
nomograph can be created.[13] uses this approach to create a
nomograph for a 69kV line. Such diagram is a straight line
from the point of origin as can be expected for the topology of
the line used for the study.
For a radial distribution line with a different topology the
results are different and no straight lines from start to end can
be expected as will be seen.
A pitfall of the use of nomographs is that changes in the
system configuration change the form of the graph so for
every configuration change a new set of nomographs has to be
developed for the distribution system under study. This was a
real challenge a few years ago when the computational burden
imposed by short circuit calculation programs made it
impossible to have a real time update of the influence of the
network conditions in the short circuit reactance of the system
for faults along the different lines. But the increasing power of
todays computers has made it possible to perform such
calculations in a very short time even using general purpose
programs such as Matlab.
II. REACTANCE GRAPHICS

Figure 1 Radial Distribution Network

For a radial network like the one in Figure 1 the reactance
distribution as seen from point zero for equally spaced short
circuits along the line is the one shown in. This reactance
profile is the result of a parametric simulation of three circuits
with the same topology and different impedances. The
simulation was made using SimPowerSystems and single
phase, phase to phase, and three phase short circuits were
simulated every 100m along each of the lines. 18000 different
simulation cases were analyzed. Each run of the simulations
took no more than a few minutes in a non-optimized
software/hardware platform.


Figure 2 Reactance vs Distance Mixed Line



3
Figure 2 shows that the radial distribution network used for
the simulation has different reactance values for equal
distances from the origin or equal reactance values for
different distances from the origin. This is the reason why
multiple distance values are obtained when reactance
algorithms like Takagis are used to find the distance to the
fault in this kind of circuits.
Also the form of the reactance diagram changes for the
following conditions:
Load changes.
Distributed Generation insertion in different points in
the network.
Changes in the network grounding system.
A circuit with the same topology but with different cables or
lines will present a different reactance vs distance
characteristic as can be seen in the following graphics.

Figure 3 Reactance vs Distance Aerial line.

Figure 4 Reactance Vs Distance underground Line
The reasons for the differences between the reactance vs
distance curves can be attributed to the different impedances
and line sizes shown in the following table.
III. TAKAGI ALGORITHM APPLICATION
The fault distance can be calculated using the Takagi
algorithm. The following graphics show the fault distances
calculated.


Figure 5 Fault Distance and Takagi CC3F. Aerial Line.

Figure 6 Fault Distance and Takagi CC3F. Mixed Line

Figure 7 Fault Distance and Takagi. CC3F underground
line
The error from the application of the Takagi method for such
cases can be seen in the following graphics:




4
Figure 8 Error Vs distance.
The fault location error from the application of the Takagi
method to distribution lines is usually high and increments
with the distance from the origin at which the fault is
simulated. A more homogeneous line has a smoother error line
which may indicate that a better parameterization of the
algorithm could improve its performance.
It is possible to use the incorrect results of Takagis algorithm
even with high error levels whenever the precision levels are
kept constant by using nomographs.

IV. USE OF NOMOGRAPHS.
Using Takagis algorithm results and plotting them vs the
distance to the fault used in the simulations, to form a
nomograph like the one defined in section II results in the
following graphics:


Figure 9 Nomograph Aerial Line


Figure 10 Nomograph Mixed Line


Figure 11 Nomograph Underground Line

These graphics can be used, despite the errors of the
application of Takagis algorithm to obtain an accurate
assessment of the distance to the fault. If the result of the
application of the Takagi algorithm is available for a given
fault; the true location of the fault can be obtained by simply
using the appropriate nomograph. Discerning between
multiple location results can be made using more information
from the network. Such tabular intersection methods can be
easily implemented in digital relays or as a function of
distribution management software.
V. ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS
AND SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINES.
The computational intelligence technique selected for this
work was a combination of an artificial neural network and a
support vector machine. In this case the support vector
machine is used as the input to the system and provides the
classification of the fault types to the ANN which provides the
actual location.
A support vector machine is an automatic learning system that
efficiently solves classification and regression problems and
that has positioned itself above other computational
intelligence techniques for the solution of classification
problems where only a small amount of data is available.
SVMs are based on statistical learning theory and stand out in
the solution of real problems being a robust tool in noisy and
complex domains.
SVMs try to find the best solution by isolating the hyperplane
that optimally separates the training patterns according to their
classes. Such classes must have been previously mapped to a
high dimensional space in order to minimize the structural
risk. The success of the SVM is based on three elements:
1. They have a strong mathematical foundation.
2. They are based on the concept of minimizing the
structural risk by minimizing the probability of
making an erroneous classification on new test cases
which is especially important when there are only a
few training cases.
3. Disponen de potentes herramientas y algoritmos para
hallar la solucin de manera rpida y eficiente.


5
In power systems the SVM have been successfully employed
in the following scenarios:
1. Transient stability analysis.
2. Demand forecast
3. Topology verification of the power system.
4. Fault current discrimination and inrush current in
Transformers.
5. Security evaluation in the power system.
6. Adaptive stabilizers for power systems.
7. Disturbance classification.
8. Fault Location.
A more detailed description of the SVM can be found on [14].
For this work an implementation similar to that presented in
[15] was used. This is not a new approach and was selected for
the relative simplicity of implementation and for the stability
of the results provided.
The ANN-SVM was applied to the same problem as before;
that is to the location of faults along the radial distribution
network presented above.
Several types of faults were simulated along the radial
distribution network to provide both, the training cases and the
test cases for the SVM. Such faults were generated at each of
the inflexion points of the networks topology. No high
impedance faults were simulated as part of this study.
To provide a better location the ANN-SVM needs to have as
much data about the fault as possible. Such data can come
from the classifier itself or can be provided to it by an external
source. An example of such data is the fault type, i.e phase A
forward fault. The SVM part of the classifier is used to
provide a classification of the type of power system faults.
This is of extreme importance since similar values for currents
and voltages can correspond to very different fault distances
depending on the type of the fault.
It is usual to present the results of fault location studies
involving some kind of computational intelligence technique,
like the SVM, in terms of the outputs of such classifiers. That
approach is well suited when the objective of the work is to
present the merits of the classifier. However, in this case the
focus is on presenting the merits of the approach itself in terms
of the precision in the fault location which is the most
important parameter for the user.

A. Results using the ANN-SVM:
The same network shown in Figure 1was used as a test case
scenario.

VI. CONCLUSIONS
The direct applicability of reactance algorithms to
distribution networks is restricted to low complexity systems.
The multiple fault location estimation is a problem that
cannot be addressed using single terminal reactance methods
for distribution networks unless additional information of the
network is available.
The use of nomographs for the location of faults in
distribution networks with acceptable error levels despite de
errors of the reactance algorithms from which such graphs are
derived is possible whenever the precision level of the
reactance method used is kept constant.
The use of SVMs has proved to be an effective tool for
the location of faults in distribution systems. However, the
application of such methods to the problem of fault location
has been limited by factors such as, ease of use, availability of
usable training data and lack of computing power.
VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] Y. Zhang and M. Prica, "Toward Smarter Current Relays for Power
Grids," in IEEE PES General Meetin, Montreal, Canada, 2006, p. 8.
[2] T. Takagi, et al., "Development of a New Type Fault Locator Using
the One Terminal Fault-Voltage and Current Data," IEEE
Proceedings on Power apparatus and Systems, vol. PAS 101, p. 7,
August, 1982 1982.
[3] D. Novosel, et al., "Unsynchronized two-terminal fault location
estimation," IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, pp. 130-138, 1996.
[4] M. M. Saha, et al., "Review of fault location techniques for
distribution systems," presented at the Power Systems and
Communications Infrastructures for the Future, Beijing, 2002.
[3] D. Novosel, et al., "Unsynchronized two-terminal fault location
estimation," IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, pp. 130-138, 1996.
[4] M. M. Saha, et al., "Review of fault location techniques for
distribution systems," presented at the Power Systems and
Communications Infrastructures for the Future, Beijing, 2002.
[5] T. Bouthiba. Fault location in ehv transmission lines using artificial
neural networks.
[6] A. S. Bretas, et al., "A BP neural network based technique for HIF
detection and location on distribution systems with distributed
generation," presented at the Proceedings of the 2006 international
conference on Intelligent computing: Part II, Kunming, China, 2006.
[7] M. Kezunovi, et al., "A Novel Method for Transmission Network
Fault Location Using Genetic Algorithms and Sparse Field
Recordings," in IEEE PES Summer Meeting, ed, 2002.
[8] S. Vasilic and M. Kezunovic, "New Design of a Neural Network
Algorithm for Detecting and Classifying Transmission Line Faults,"
in IEEE PES Transmission and Distribution Conf, ed, 2001.
[9] M. M. Saha, et al., Fault Location on Power Networks, 1st ed.
London: Springer, 2010.
[10] A. Gopalakrishnan, et al., "Fault Location Using Distributed
Parameter Transmission Line Model," IEEE Trans. on Power
Delivery, pp. 1169-1174, 2000.
[11] IEEE, "C37.114-2004 - IEEE Guide for Determining Fault Location
on AC Transmission and Distribution Lines," ed, 2004.
[12] J. J. Mora Flores, "Localizacin de faltas en sistemas de distribucin
de energa elctrica usando metodos basados en el modelo y
mtodos basados en el conocimiento," PhD Doctoral, Escola
Politcnica Superior, Universitat de Girona, Girona, 2006.
[13] Creating Nomographs Using the SEL-Profile Transmission Line
Fault Analysis Program. Available:
http://www.selinc.com.cn/ResourceFolder/Articlefiles/2008-
5/1358618.PDF
[14] Lipo Wang. Support Vector Machines: Theory and Applications
(Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing). Springer. 2005.
[15] Thukaram, D et al. Articial Neural Network and Support Vector
Machine Approach for Locating Faults in Radial Distribution
Systems. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL.
20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005.
[16] J. J. Mora Flores, Classification methodology and feature selection
to assist fault location in power distribution systems. Rev. Fac. Ing.
Univ. Antioquia N. 44. pp. 83-96. Junio, 2008. Available:
http://jaibana.udea.edu.co/grupos/revista/revistas/nro044/09rev_44.p
df
Biographies



6

Abel Gonzlez Gmez, Received his bachelor in
Electrical Engineering and his MSc in Electrical
Engineering from the Universidad Central de Las
Villas, Cuba in 1996 and 2000. From 1996 to 2000
Worked as an Assistant professor for the Faculty of
Electrical Engineering at the Universidad Central de
Las Villas, Cuba, from 2000 to 2010 as a Teletraffic
Engineer, Control Engineer and Head of the
Marketing Department for the Cuban
Telecommunications Company and a professor of Marketing for the
Universidad Central de Las Villas, Cuba. From 2010 to 2013 worked as a
Design Engineer for Arteche Medicion y Tecnologia in Zapopan, Jalisco,
Mexico. From 2013 works as an applications Engineer for Megger, LTD in
Markham, Ontario. His research areas are the analysis operation, control and
protection of electric power systems and the application of artificial
intelligence and soft computing techniques.