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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 26, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2011

An Adaptive Decision Logic to Enhance Distance

Protection of Transmission Lines
Majid Sanaye-Pasand, Senior Member, IEEE, and Peyman Jafarian, Student Member, IEEE

AbstractThis paper introduces adaptive decision-making logic

to improve the performance of distance protection of transmission lines. The proposed approach incorporates the trajectory of
the measured impedance into the relay final decision-making logic
through a weighting procedure. Two criteria are used to weigh the
impedance plane appropriately, where higher weights are assigned
to the faults occurring at the interior areas of the relay protective
zone and low resistance faults. The weights assigned to impedance
samples are added together considering the amount of smoothness
of the measured impedance trajectory. An adaptive neurofuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is used to implement the proposed decision logic. Meanwhile, the fault current amplitude is considered
as the other input of the ANFIS network to accelerate the relay
operation for close-in faults and to incorporate an index for the
source-to-line impedance ratio into the final decision-making logic.
Extensive simulation studies using PSCAD/EMTDC software indicate that the proposed approach provides a very reliable technique
to make the distance protective scheme faster and smarter. It helps
to achieve the optimal compromise between the protective relay operation time and security.
Index TermsAdaptive protection, cross-polarization, decisionmaking logic, numerical distance relay, transmission line.

I. INTRODUCTION

ISTANCE relay is the most widely used protective technique in power networks as the main and backup protection of the transmission lines. Despite considerable advancements in digital processing algorithms and communication technology in recent decades, distance protection is still an attractive
technique due to its straightforward underlying concept and its
stand-alone operation using only the local information obtained
at the relay installation location.
With the advent of microprocessor-based relays, adaptive
protection was introduced. It offers a suitable approach to compensate for the influences of variable power system conditions
on the protection algorithms [1], [2]. Adaptive relaying is a
good tool in case of stressed power system conditions. Operation of a distance relay can be enhanced using adaptive methods
in different aspects. Third zone maloperation of the distance
relay can be avoided during the voltage instability condition
[3], [4]. Adaptive phasor estimation algorithms provide a faster

Manuscript received March 17, 2010; revised January 22, 2011; accepted
June 01, 2011. Date of publication July 19, 2011; date of current version October 07, 2011. TPWRD-00191-2010.
The authors are with the Control and Intelligent Processing Center of Excellence, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering,
University of Tehran, Tehran 14395-515, Iran (e-mail: msanaye@ut.ac.ir; p.jafarian@ece.ut.ac.ir).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2011.2159404

response to accelerate the first zone operation of the distance

relays [5], [6]. In [7], an adaptive method for the compensation
of residual current in single-phase-to-ground elements of the
distance relay is proposed. The compensation factor is defined
so that the influence of the zero-sequence current on the measured impedance for the healthy phases is less than that for the
faulted phase. This could provide a robust fault-type selection
for single-pole tripping schemes.
An adaptive adjustment of the distance relay characteristic
in response to the variation of transmission-line power flow and
the recent configuration of the power system is another approach
proposed to improve the distance relay capability to include the
effect of the fault resistance and the transmission-line loading
condition [8], [9]. In the case of parallel transmission lines,
which are influenced by the mutual coupling effect, adaptive adjustment of the relay operation based on the availability of different input signals could help achieve the optimal performance
for the distance protection technique [10], [11].
The final relay decision, trip or nontrip, is usually issued
through a simple method. When the fault-loop impedance
calculated by the distance relay falls inside the protective zone,
an internal fault is detected. A distance relay should operate
promptly for its first protected zone. Nevertheless, in order to
achieve the required security for the protection scheme, a trip
command would not be issued until some successive samples of
the measured impedance lie inside the protected zone [6], [12].
This would delay the relay operation which may be harmful
particularly in the case of some critical faults occurring at the
beginning parts of the transmission line.
One of the important advantages of digital relays is their
ability to make adaptive decisions in their final processing
stage. It must be recognized that identification of the faults
occurring in a power system is not a deterministic issue because
of many uncertainties which may affect the discrimination
criterion of a protection philosophy. The probabilistic nature
which exists in the fault condition with respect to the fault type,
the fault location, the fault resistance, etc., could lead to an
overlap between the faulty and nonfaulty conditions [12]. In
other words, while a disturbance detected at the relay location
could be an internal fault occurring inside the protected zone
with some degree of certainty, it could also be an external fault
or a nonfaulty condition with another degree of certainty.
An adaptive logic for the final decision-making process can
help to achieve the optimal compromise between accuracy and
speed of a protection scheme for discrimination of the internal
faults. It permits including the fault and the transmission system
conditions into the relay final decision. In the adaptive decision
logic, once the fault is detected with a high degree of certainty,
the relay would issue the trip command rapidly, whereas for the

0885-8977/$26.00 2011 IEEE

SANAYE-PASAND AND JAFARIAN: ADAPTIVE DECISION LOGIC TO ENHANCE DISTANCE PROTECTION

faults detected with a low degree of certainty, the relay could

extend its operation time to obtain more information about the
fault. Meanwhile, a combination of different algorithms outputs,
which are based on different protection philosophies, could also
help to increase the certainty degree for the identification of internal faults.
This paper introduces adaptive decision-making logic for distance relaying applications. The underlying idea utilizes trajectory of the measured impedance through a weighting procedure,
in which higher weights are considered for the impedance samples which fall within the interior areas of the protected zone.
A higher weight indicates a higher degree of certainty about
the occurrence of an internal fault. On the other hand, considering lower weights for the measured impedances, which
are located at the end boundary areas of the protected zone,
indicates a lower degree of certainty about the occurrence of
an internal fault. The weighting procedure is carried out on a
certain number of successive impedance samples, and the obtained weights are added together. When the resulting value exceeds a certain threshold, the distance relay issues the trip command. The amount of smoothness of the measured impedance
trajectory is also considered in the proposed decision logic. This
way, the effect of any undesirable rapid change in the measured
impedance curve due to the transient response of the phasor estimation algorithm or invalid input data is reduced.
An adaptive neurofuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is used
to implement the proposed weighting procedure. Meanwhile,
some successive samples of the fault current amplitude are
included as the ANFIS inputs to form a high-set overcurrent relay covering a small portion at the beginning of the
transmission line. This way, not only does the relay operation accelerate for clearance of close-in faults through
increasing the impedance plane weights, but also an index for
the source-to-line impedance ratio (SIR) is included into the
decision-making logic. Further adjustments in the suggested
decision logic are also made to adaptively include the influences of the transmission line power flow and the fault direction
determined by the cross-polarization technique. The simulation
studies are carried out using the power system simulation
software PSCAD/EMTDC. The obtained results indicate that
the proposed approach is capable to make the protective relay
faster and smarter, and provides a very secure and reliable
technique to enhance the decision logic of the distance relay.
Using the proposed adaptive decision logic, the first protected
zone of the distance relay can be extended to cover a higher
percentage of the transmission line. This would help increase
power system security against instability.

II. PROPOSED ADAPTIVE DECISION LOGIC

The final decision of a distance relay is usually made in a
nonadaptive manner. The trip command would be issued when
a certain number of successive measured impedance samples
lie inside the relay protected zone. In the case of close-in faults,
the delay caused by the decision logic might be harmful to the
power system components due to the very high amount of the
fault current. On the other hand, if very fast operation is intended

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Fig. 1. Weighting of the distance relay first zone.

for the relay, the power system transients after occurrence of the
fault might lead to distance relay maloperation.
The proposed approach in this paper incorporates the fault
condition into the final decision logic to improve the performance of the distance relay. The fault location, the fault effective
resistance, the amount of variation of the successive impedance
samples measured by the relay, and the fault current amplitude
are considered in the proposed decision logic.
For the conventional distance relay, the operation speed is the
same for all of the faults within the first relay zone. Some researchers have tried to increase the relay operation speed for
faults at the initial portion of the transmission line, (e.g., at
20%) to improve system stability and reduce damage to system
equipment. One of the most important advantages of the proposed approach is that it adds an extra dimension into the decision-making space by which the relay operates faster for faults
with a higher degree of certainty.
A. Weighting the Relay Zone
The amplitude of the fault current is inversely proportional
to the fault-loop impedance. Hence, short-circuit faults occurring at the beginning parts of the transmission line should be
cleared rapidly due to the high amount of fault current, whereas
for the remote end and high-resistance faults, the relay could extend its operation time. As shown in Fig. 1, the first zone of the
distance relay can be divided into several segments, in which
higher weights are considered for the segments containing interior areas of the protected zone. Furthermore, the areas around
the transmission-line replica impedance correspond to the lowimpedance faults, for which the impedance measured by the distance relay is less affected by the fault resistance and the remote
end infeed current. Consider that higher weights for these areas
imply a higher degree of certainty for occurrence of an internal
fault. The boundary areas at the top and right sides of the relay
zone characteristic correspond to the faults with a lower degree
of certainty which could be considered as less critical conditions
due to higher fault-loop impedance.
Two criteria are considered to weigh the first zone of the relay
appropriately. In order to weigh the protected zone interior areas
with higher values, the weight function given in (1) is defined as
the first criterion. It determines the corresponding weight of any

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point in the impedance plane according to the absolute value of

the fault loop impedance

(1)
denotes the first zone impedance reach, and
is the
where
and are two constant paramimpedance of the given point.
eters, which determine the shape of the weight function. The
ratio of the considered weight for the close-in faults to the considered weight for the boundary faults can be increased through
reducing the parameter . Therefore, a higher value is assigned
to faults with smaller fault-loop impedance which lead to higher
fault currents and should be cleared faster.
Another weight function is defined to assign higher weights
to the faults with small fault resistance. As previously pointed
out, the areas around the transmission-line replica impedance
in the relay protective zone correspond to the low-impedance
faults. The horizontal distance between any given point in the
and the transmission-line replica
impedance plane
impedance can be calculated as follows:
(2)
(3)
where
and
are the real and imaginary parts of the first, respectively. The index defined
zone impedance that reach
in (3) determines the amount of closeness of the given point to
the transmission-line replica impedance. Higher weights can be
assigned to the impedance plane areas which correspond to the
low-impedance faults by
(4)
is a constant parameter and
denotes the index dewhere
fined in (3). At a certain fault location, the difference between
the weight assigned by (4) to a low-impedance fault and that
assigned to a high-resistance fault can be reduced through decreasing the parameter .
The two weights obtained by (1) and (4) are added together
to calculate the final weight for any given point. Meanwhile, it
should be noted that if one of the described criteria is of greater
importance, different coefficients could be used in the additional
process of these two weights. Assuming the same importance
for both of the aforementioned criteria, the final weight is calculated as
(5)
B. Measured Impedance Trajectory
This weighting procedure is implemented on a certain
number of successive impedance samples to combine their
effects on the distance relay operation. In this combination,
the effect of any undesirable sudden change in the measured
impedance curve due to the transients generated after the fault

occurrence or invalid input data is reduced. In other words,

when the postfault waveforms are severely distorted and, consequently, the measured impedance curve does not smoothly
converge to its final value, the weights are reduced to increase
the relay security.
For this purpose, the least-squares (LS) algorithm is used to fit
a second-order polynomial to the successive impedance samples
which are present in the data window. For a given impedance
measured at the sample , the normalized deviation from
the fitted impedance curve is defined as
(6)
where
denotes the estimated impedance obtained by the
fitted polynomial. The weight corresponding to each impedance
sample is multiplied by the smoothness coefficient calculated
in (7) to obtain its value on the decision-making logic
(7)
This way, the proposed weighing procedure includes the measured impedance trajectory into the decision-making logic. It
not only accelerates the distance relay operation for the faults
with a higher degree of certainty but also improves the relay security by preventing the relay maloperation due to the undesired
transient response of the phasor estimation algorithm as well as
the instrument transformers.
C. Parallel Overcurrent Relay
An overcurrent relay detects the occurrence of a fault using
the amplitude of the fault current. Since the fault current amplitude depends on the power network condition behind the relay
location and the forward fault-loop impedance, identification of
the protected zone internal faults may encounter difficulty if the
power system configuration changes. Nevertheless, in most conditions, a high-set overcurrent relay covering the beginning of
the transmission line can identify the close-in faults with a high
degree of certainty.
In order to accelerate the decision-making logic for clearance
of the close-in faults, a high set overcurrent relays is employed
in parallel with the distance relay. When the fault current amplitude is higher than a predefined threshold, the impedance
plane weights are increased to accelerate the relay operation.
The overcurrent threshold is set to protect 20% of the beginning of the transmission line when the source-to-line impedance
ratio is equal to one. It should be noted that the fault current
amplitude depends on the system SIR as well as the fault-loop
impedance. Therefore, with the increasing SIR value, the coverage of the overcurrent relay would be reduced. Nevertheless,
since at higher SIR values the fault current is smaller, this would
not cause a major problem on the performance of the protection
scheme.
III. IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROPOSED LOGIC
An adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system provides
an appropriate infrastructure to implement the described decision-making logic. The ANFIS is, in fact, a fuzzy inference

SANAYE-PASAND AND JAFARIAN: ADAPTIVE DECISION LOGIC TO ENHANCE DISTANCE PROTECTION

system embedded into the framework of the artificial neural

network (ANN) [13]. The fuzzy inference system partitions
the input space into several segments, in which the assigned
membership functions determine the membership degree of any
given input to each segment. It permits incorporating the uncertainty of the estimated fault location into the decision-making
logic (i.e., when the measured impedance is located in a specified segment). It also belongs to the adjacent segments with
other membership degrees. Meanwhile, by including some
other inputs for the ANFIS network in addition to the measured
impedances, it helps to achieve the optimal performance for the
protective relay under different fault conditions.
In recent decades, the application of artificial neural networks has been proposed to provide more efficient protection
algorithms [14]. Nevertheless, in practice, the ANN-based
relays have not been utilized yet widely, due to some difficulties, such as a lack of definite rules for choosing training
parameters and an optimal network structure [15]. In addition,
in most approaches, the neural network is regarded as a black
box which is assigned to find a hidden relationship between
some inputs-outputs data during the training procedure. On
the contrary, the proposed approach in this paper is a more
transparent application of ANFIS to make the decision-making
logic smarter and more reliable.
A. ANFIS Network Structure
Fig. 2 depicts the structure of the ANFIS-based network proposed to implement the weighting procedure. A data window
of successive measured impedances up to the present instant
as well as the last three estimated current amplitudes
are considered as the network inputs. The proposed network is
divided into two stages. The first stage subnetwork is used to
weigh the impedance plane segments, and its output is the corresponding weight of each impedance sample present in the data
window. This stage consists of identical ANFIS subnetworks,
where the th subnetwork inputs include the real and imaginary
.
parts of the impedance measured at the instant of
As illustrated in Fig. 1, an area containing the relay zone can
be used for the first-stage ANFIS subnetworks. The relay zone is
considered as a mask layer, so that if the measured impedance
is not located within the relay zone, the output of the ANFIS
subnetwork is reset to zero. This method not only provides the
required accuracy for the weighting procedure by using a low
number of neurons, it also allows adaptive adjustment of the
relay zone characteristic without any need to retrain the ANFIS
network.
The second stage consists of an ANFIS subnetwork which
combines the effect of the weights obtained at the first stage. It
incorporates the measured impedance trajectory into the decision-making logic. In addition, the amplitude of the fault current
estimated by the overcurrent relay is considered as other input
of the second-stage ANFIS subnetwork. It can speed up the
relay operation for the case of close-in faults. Meanwhile, since
the fault current amplitude depends on the equivalent source
impedance, the source-to-line impedance ratio at the relay location is implicitly involved in the decision-making logic.
It should be noted that instead of using the aforementioned
proposed two-stage ANFIS network, an integrated network

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Fig. 2. Structure of the proposed ANFIS network.

could also be employed to include all of the measured impedances as its inputs and directly resulting the final output.
Nevertheless, it is found that the proposed structure requires
many less neurons compared to the integrated network to
achieve the same accuracy. The number of required neurons
, whereas
at the second layer of the integrated network is
it is equal to
for the proposed structure, where denotes
the number of the successive impedances considered as the
inputs and denotes the number of the segments considered
for partitioning the relay zone characteristic.
B. Training the ANFIS Network
The ANFIS network is trained in two steps, in which the first
and second stages ANFIS subnetworks are trained separately.
The first-stage ANFIS subnetworks provide the impedance samaccording to the two criteria described in the
ples weights
previous section (i.e.,
and
). An identical ANFIS is used
for all of the first-stage subnetworks, and their training data set
is generated without simulating the transmission system. Two
vectors comprising different values within the range of the predefined distance relay protective area are generated as the subnetworks inputs. These two vectors consist of real and imaginary parts of the impedances which are inputs of the ANFIS
subnetworks. The corresponding weights of the input pairs are
calculated by (5) and each ANFIS subnetwork is trained using
the least-squares and back-propagation algorithms.
The second-stage ANFIS subnetwork makes the final decision considering the measured impedance trajectory as well as
the fault current amplitude. The training data set for this stage
is generated by using the simulated power system model. By
changing the fault type, the fault effective resistance, and the
fault inception angle, various internal and external faults are
simulated to provide the training and validation data sets. The
validation data set is different from those used for training the
ANFIS. During the second stage of the training process, the parameters of the first-stage subnetworks are kept constant.

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Referring to Fig. 2, each input vector comprises of the real

and imaginary parts of the measured impedances as well as
three successive samples of the estimated current amplitude.
The output corresponding to each input vector determines the
relay trip command, which is considered as one for the case that
the disturbances are identified as internal faults, and zero for the
cases of external faults and the internal faults which have not
been identified yet and require more impedance samples within
the distance relay zone.
During the training procedure, in order to obtain the corresponding output for each input vector, the weights provided by
the first-stage subnetworks are added together considering the
smoothness coefficient given in (7), and the result is compared
to a defined threshold. If the obtained result is higher than the
threshold, the corresponding output would be set at one; otherwise, the output would be considered zero. Meanwhile, if the
fault is identified by the high-set overcurrent relay and a few
successive impedance samples are located inside the relay zone,
the output would be set at one. For the case of external faults,
the output is always set at zero.
IV. ADAPTIVE ADJUSTMENT OF THE RELAY CHARACTERISTIC
An ideal relay characteristic can be obtained by considering
the remote-end infeed-current and the prefault loading condition. If both ends SIRs are available at the relay location, the
relay characteristic could be adjusted adaptively in accordance
with the recent power system condition [8], [9]. Nevertheless,
it requires a communication link from the remote end of the
transmission line or the supervisory control and data-acquisition (SCADA) system.
The relay zone characteristic can be adjusted optimally only
using the local information measured at the relay location, in
which the borders of the relay zone characteristic are adjusted
in accordance with the transmission-line load flow and the fault
direction determined by the cross-polarization technique.
A. Influence of the Transmission-Line Load Flow
Fig. 3 represents a simple two-terminal transmission line, in
which R denotes the relay location protecting the transmission
line AB. The impedance measured by the relay after occurrence
of a fault on the transmission line is given by
(8)
represents the fault resistance and
is the transmiswhere
may tilt down or
sion-line impedance. The vector
up due to the direction of power transfer across the transmission line [16]. In the case of power transfer from bus A to bus
B, the reactance measured by the relay would be smaller than
the actual value, whereas for the reverse direction of the power
transfer, it would be greater than the actual value. As shown in
Fig. 4, in order to avoid the distance relay overreach or underreach errors due to the remote-end infeed current, the top border
of the quadrilateral characteristic can be rotated adaptively according to the transmission-line load flow so that the influence
of the remote-end infeed current on the measured impedance is
included.

Fig. 3. One-line diagram of a typical two-terminal transmission line.

Fig. 4. Adaptive adjustment of the relay top border slope in accordance with
the power transfer direction.

B. Adjustment of the Directional Characteristic

A self-polarized relay utilizes the voltage in the short-circuit
loop as the polarization quantity. This quantity is required to
determine whether the fault is in forward or reverse directions.
distance relay is inherently diIt is well known that the
rectional and no separate directional measurement is necessary.
When the measured impedance falls inside the relay zone, an internal fault in the forward direction is concluded. This method
has the disadvantage that in the case of some close-in faults directly in front of or behind the relay location, no directional
measurement is possible, because the voltage may become, in
theory, equal to zero. Furthermore, in some cases of close-in
faults, in the reverse direction, the measured impedance could
fall within the relay zone due to the influence of the transmission-line load flow [16].
When the healthy-phase voltage is used as the polarization
quantity, the shape of the relay zone characteristic would
change in accordance with the equivalent source impedance at
the relay location and the transmission-line load flow [17]. In
other words, a cross-polarized distance relay inherently benefits
from adaptive adjustment of the relay zone characteristic.
In this paper, it is proposed to use the cross-polarization concept to adjust the relay directional characteristic adaptively. As
illustrated in Fig. 5, for a fault in the forward direction, the adapis
tively expanded protective zone by the complex number
used whereas in the case of reverse faults, the protective zone
is compressed upwards. For simplicity, the complex number
is selected to be 25% of the zone reach point
. The shift
of the relay zone characteristic implies that for close-in faults,
a definite directional decision is achieved, even if the postfault
voltage becomes zero. This way, the forward and reverse faults
can be well distinguished.
C. Implementing the Relay Characteristic Adjustment
The relay zone characteristic is adjusted adaptively using a
subroutine in the implemented program. An initial zone is con-

SANAYE-PASAND AND JAFARIAN: ADAPTIVE DECISION LOGIC TO ENHANCE DISTANCE PROTECTION

Fig. 5. Adjustment of the protective zone characteristic of the cross-polarized

relay. (a) For forward faults. (b) For backward faults.

Fig. 6. One-line diagram of the simulated transmission system.

sidered for the relay which is the same as that of the nonadaptive
conventional distance relay. Then, according to the aforementioned criteria, the borders of the initial zone are modified. The
top horizontal border is rotated in accordance with the direction and the amount of the power transfer. The left and bottom
borders are adjusted by using the cross-polarization method as
described in the previous subsection. After performing the zone
adjustment, the weighting procedure is performed on the specified number of the successive impedance samples. As previously stated, if any of the impedance samples is located outside
the relay zone, its corresponding weight is set at zero.
V. SIMULATION STUDIES AND ANALYSIS
Extensive simulation studies were carried out to evaluate the
performance of the proposed approach. The one-line diagram
of the transmission system under study is depicted in Fig. 6,
in which R denotes the relay location protecting the transmission line AB. The frequency-dependent distributed model of
the transmission line was used to accurately include the influence of the generated transients after the fault occurrence. The
parameters of the simulated transmission system are given in
the Appendix. The power system simulation software PSCAD/
EMTDC was used to perform the simulations. The sampling
frequency was considered to be 1440 Hz, which corresponds
to the sampling rate of 24 samples/cycle. The simulation data
were used in a MATLAB program in the playback mode to implement the proposed algorithm.

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The full-cycle Fourier algorithm (FCDFT) is employed to extract the fundamental phasor of the fault signals. The phasor estimation error due to the decaying-dc component is eliminated
using the method proposed in [5]. The relay first zone reach is
set to protect 90% of the transmission line. The obtained results are compared with a nonadaptive decision logic, in which
an internal fault is concluded if a certain number of the measured impedances lie within the protected zone. For the sake
of comparison, we have tried to obtain the same performance
for the proposed adaptive and the nonadaptive decision-making
logics at the relay boundary limit areas. The number of required
impedance samples within the relay zone is selected so that it
covers a half cycle of the power frequency for the conventional
algorithm. The adaptive method parameters are set so that it provides the same performance for the remote-end faults.
It was found that when the nonadaptive logic is based on
the required number of successive impedance samples within
the relay zone, the relay operation may be delayed for some
boundary limit faults where some of the measured impedance
samples fall out of the relay zone. The relay operation logic
is reset even if only one of the successive samples falls out of
the zone. Therefore, a counter-based algorithm was used for the
nonadaptive logic. The counter value would be increased by one,
whenever a new impedance sample falls within the relay zone.
Otherwise, if the counter value is greater than zero and the new
impedance sample falls out of the relay zone, instead of resetting
the counter, the counter value would be decreased by two. The
trip command would be issued when the counter value exceeds
the defined threshold. It speeds up operation of the nonadaptive
method especially for the boundary faults.
A. Training the ANFIS Subnetworks
An ANFIS subnetwork consisting of nine membership functions for each input was trained to weigh the impedance plane
at the first stage of the proposed structure. Fig. 7 depicts the surface of the trained first-stage ANFIS subnetwork. As shown, a
rectangular area covering the distance relay zone is assumed for
the inputs. An identical ANFIS was used for all of the first-stage
subnetworks.
The training and validation data sets for the second-stage
ANFIS were generated by simulating the power system under
different fault conditions including different fault inception angles, fault locations, fault resistances, fault types, power angles, and different SIR values. The corresponding output for
each input vector was provided by the described model in Section III-B.
The method used for training the ANFIS network is the combined least-squares and back-propagation algorithm. For this
purpose, parameters of the adaptive network are decomposed
, where the adaptive network
into two sets, say
is linear in terms of the elements of S2. Each epoch of this hybrid procedure consists of a forward pass and a backward pass.
In the forward pass, for given fixed values of parameters in S1,
the parameters of S2 are estimated by using the least-squares
error method (LSE). In the backward pass, the error rates propagate from the output end toward the input end, and the parameters of S1 are updated using the gradient method.

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TABLE I
PROPOSED ALGORITHM RESPONSE TO CLOSE-IN FAULTS

Fig. 7. Surface of the trained first-stage ANFIS subnetwork.

Considering the structure of the ANFIS network, the ANFIS

network consists of five layers [13]. The second, third, and fifth
layers contain fixed nodes which do not have any parameters
to be trained. The overall output can be expressed as a linear
combination of the fourth-layer parameters. Therefore, these parameters belong to the S2 set and can be obtained by using the
least-squares error method. The parameters of the first layer,
which define the input space membership functions, belong to
the S1 set. Due to the application of the LSE method, for given
fixed values of S1, the obtained parameters of S2 are the global
optimum point in the S2 parameter space. In this stage, the LSE
method guarantees providing the global minima and not the
local one. In order to ensure that the parameters of S1 are also
the global optimum points, the ANFIS network was trained several times using different initial values and then the mean errorepoch graphs and the obtained membership functions were compared. It was found that all of the trained networks parameters
converge to almost the same final values.
B. Evaluation of the Proposed Approach
Many different simulation studies were carried out to evaluate
the performance of the proposed ANFIS-based decision logic,
and some of the obtained results are described.
1) Close-in Faults: Some of the obtained results for the case
of close-in faults on the transmission line AB are presented in
Table I. The performance of the proposed algorithm is studied
for different conditions by changing the fault type, fault resistance, fault inception angle, and SIR. As shown in Table I, the
performance of the proposed adaptive logic is superior compared with that of the conventional algorithm. The proposed algorithm provides a faster response. For example, for the first
case, operation times of the proposed and conventional algorithms are 9.23 and 23.81 ms, respectively.
Fig. 8 depicts the measured impedance trajectories for the last
two cases presented in Table I. In these cases, a high source-toline impedance ratio is assumed to exclude the influence of the
high-set overcurrent relay on the proposed decision logic operation. When a high-resistance fault occurs on the transmission line, the remote end transients as well as the infeed current affect the fault-loop impedance measured by the distance

Fig. 8. Measured impedance trajectories for the last two cases of Table I. (a)
For small fault resistance. (b) For high fault resistance.

relay. For the last case, when the fault resistance is high, the
impedance samples weights are smaller. As can be seen, the proposed adaptive logic operates longer to increase the protective
scheme reliability.
Fig. 9 shows the measured impedance trajectory for the 16th
case of Table I. A single-phase-to-ground fault occurs at a 7-km
distance from bus A. As can be seen, the protective zone characteristic is expanded by using the cross-polarization technique.
In this case, the proposed adaptive logic issues the trip command at 16.17 ms, whereas the nonadaptive logic operates at
35.61 ms after the fault occurrence. The protective zone borders of the nonadaptive relay are shown by the dashed lines in
Fig. 9. The long operation time of the nonadaptive algorithm is
mainly due to some of the measured impedance samples falling
out of the relay zone from the left and bottom borders. If the
same cross-polarized method is used to adjust the relay directional characteristic for the proposed adaptive and nonadaptive

SANAYE-PASAND AND JAFARIAN: ADAPTIVE DECISION LOGIC TO ENHANCE DISTANCE PROTECTION

Fig. 9. Measured impedance trajectory for a close-in fault on the transmission

line AB.

Fig. 10. Measured impedance trajectory for a reverse fault occurring very close
to bus A on the transmission line AC.

logics, the operation time of the nonadaptive algorithm would be

reduced to 20.33 ms. Nevertheless, the proposed adaptive logic
still provides faster operation speed due to higher weights considered for the interior areas of the protected zone.
The measured impedance trajectory for a reverse fault occurring very close to bus A on the transmission line AC is depicted
in Fig. 10. In this case, the faulted phase voltage becomes too
small and some impedance samples enter the protective zone
of the self-polarized distance relay. As shown, the proposed
adaptive relay zone characteristic is compressed upwards by
using the cross-polarization technique. It prevents the protective scheme maloperation.
When a fault occurs at the instant of voltage-zero-crossing,
the generated transients in the transmission system are less
compared to those caused by faults at high-voltage magnitudes.
Hence, the measured impedance curve converges to its final
value smoothly. The second and fourth cases of Table I present
the proposed algorithm responses for single-phase-to-ground
faults at small- and high-voltage magnitudes, respectively.
As can be seen, the proposed decision logic provides faster
response for the fault occurring at smaller voltage magnitude.
Meanwhile, for both cases, the proposed adaptive algorithm
operates faster compared to the conventional algorithm.

2141

Fig. 11. Measured impedance trajectory for the fourth case presented in Table I.

At low SIR values, the high-set overcurrent relay contributes

to the decision logic to operate more rapidly. As an example,
Fig. 11 depicts the measured impedance trajectory for the fourth
case of Table I. The proposed adaptive logic operates when the
high-set overcurrent relay detects the fault and some successive
samples of the measured impedance lie within the distance relay
protected zone. In this case, the proposed adaptive relay operates
in 10.61 ms after the fault occurrence whereas the nonadaptive
logic operation time is 25.19 ms.
At high SIR values, it takes a longer time until the measured
impedance trajectory enters the relay zone. Meanwhile, the coverage of the overcurrent relay would be reduced due to a smaller
magnitude of the fault current. Nevertheless, the proposed decision logic provides a faster response compared to the nonadaptive algorithm due to higher weights considered for the interior
areas of the protected zone.
2) Boundary Faults: Various simulation studies were performed to test the proposed adaptive logic performance for
boundary faults under different conditions. Some of the obtained results are presented in Table II. In this table, the fault
distance is given from bus A. In all of these cases, the proposed
logic is able to reliably discriminate between the internal and
external faults. For external faults, the algorithm response is
tested using different faults on the remote-end bus and farther
locations.
As previously mentioned, appropriate parameters are selected
so that the proposed adaptive logic and the nonadaptive algorithm provide almost the same performance at the boundarylimit areas of the protected zone. Once the measured impedance
lies at these areas, the proposed decision logic assigns a low
weight to it due to a low certainty degree of occurrence of an
internal fault. This way, the adaptive logic extends the relay operation time to achieve higher reliability.
In the performed simulations, current and voltage instrument
transformers are modeled. It was found that the capacitor
voltage transformer (CVT) transient could affect the performance of the relay first zone. This is due to the fact that for
some external faults beyond the remote bus, some of the measured impedance samples may fall inside the relay first zone
due to the CVT transients and, consequently, the relay might
maloperate. On the other hand, when a current transformer (CT)

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 26, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2011

TABLE II
PROPOSED ALGORITHM RESPONSE TO BOUNDARY FAULTS

Fig. 12. Measured impedance trajectory for an external fault occurring on bus
B.

is saturated, the amplitude of the current fundamental phasor

measured by the relay is less than its actual value. Therefore,
the impedance measured by the distance relay becomes larger
than the actual value. This means that saturation of the current
transformer does not lead to the relay false trip for the external
faults even if very fast operation speed is considered for the
relay first zone.
For the simulated system, when the source-to-line impedance
ratio is less than seven, both of the proposed and nonadaptive
logics provide a secure protective scheme. For higher values
of SIR, the nonadaptive logic may operate incorrectly due to
the transient response of the capacitor voltage transformers.
The CVTs transients are more critical, in particular, for large
voltage drops after the fault occurrence. Therefore, for a high
SIR system, where a remote end fault may cause a large voltage
drop at the relay location, the CVTs transients could lead to
the relay overreach error [18]. As an example, the last case of
Table II presents the obtained result for an external three-phase
fault at bus B. In this case, the nonadaptive logic operates
incorrectly due to the influence of the CVTs transients on the
measured impedances, whereas the proposed decision logic
works properly.
Fig. 12 depicts the measured impedance trajectory for the
16th case of Table II. In this case, an external single-phase-toground fault occurs on bus B when the SIR value is high. As can
be seen, the measured impedance curve contains rapid oscillations which are mainly due to the CVT-induced transients on the
measured voltage. The proposed smoothness factor helps to reduce the influence of the CVTs transients on the relay operation.
Meanwhile, including the fault current amplitude among the inputs of the proposed ANFIS-based logic, not only does it help to

accelerate the relay operation for the close-in faults, but also implicitly involves an index of the source-to-line impedance ratio
into the decision-making logic. In other words, for a certain
fault-loop impedance measured by the relay, the fault current
amplitude would be smaller at higher SIR values. This feature
could be recognized by the ANFIS-based logic to prevent relay
maloperation during the transient interval of the CVTs when the
SIR value is high.
To prevent maloperation of the nonadaptive algorithm,
the relay first zone reach should be reduced. An alternative
approach is to increase the number of required impedance
samples within the relay protective zone. Nevertheless, this
would also increase the operation time of the nonadaptive logic
undesirably for the other faults occurring inside interior areas
of the protected zone.
3) Other Faults: Table III presents some of the obtained
results for faults occurring at different locations of the transmission line. As designed, the operation speed of the proposed
relay is in proportion to the fault condition. In the case of
low impedance faults, where the measured impedance is less
affected by the remote-end infeed current, the relay operates
faster, whereas in the case of high-resistance faults, the relay
operates longer.
The proposed adaptive decision logic provides high flexibility to achieve the optimal compromise between the protection scheme operation speed and security under different fault
conditions. Therefore, while the relay operates more rapidly for
the faults occurring at the interior areas of the protected zone, it
is capable of providing high security for the boundary faults.
4) High-Resistance Faults: The quadrilateral characteristic
used for the single-phase-to-ground elements of the relay provides higher capability in identification of high-resistance faults.
The maximum fault resistance (Rf) covered by the first zone of
the relay depends on the selected resistive reach. By increasing
this value, higher Rf in the first zone could also be covered.
The last five cases of Table III present the obtained results
for the cases of high-resistance faults at different locations of
the protected transmission line. As can be found, the relay first
zone is able to cover high-resistance faults up to several tens

SANAYE-PASAND AND JAFARIAN: ADAPTIVE DECISION LOGIC TO ENHANCE DISTANCE PROTECTION

TABLE III
PROPOSED ALGORITHM RESPONSE TO DIFFERENT FAULTS

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protecting the beginning part of the transmission line is also

employed to accelerate the relay operation for close-in faults.
The proposed adaptive logic is implemented using an ANFIS
network.
The simulation studies show that the proposed adaptive logic
is able to improve the distance relay performance and increase
the relay flexibility in adaption to the fault condition. The obtained results indicate that the proposed approach can accelerate
the relay operation for clearance of the close-in as well as the
low-impedance faults. Moreover, it can enhance the relay operation for the faults occurring at the transmission-line boundary
limits and provide higher security compared to the conventional
nonadaptive decision logic. Using the proposed adaptive logic,
the first protective zone of the distance relay could be extended
to cover a higher percentage of the transmission line.
APPENDIX
The parameters of the 400-kV transmission system used for
the simulation studies are as follows.
Equivalent source impedances

Transmission-line parameters
of ohms. By increasing the relay resistive reach value, a higher
amount of Rf could also be covered by the first zone. In addition, faults with higher resistances would be identified by the
second protective zone of the distance relay. For the case of very
high-resistance faults (i.e., 100 or 200 ), the fault is usually
identified by the relay second zone. In these cases, the relay operation time is equal to the second zone operation time of the
impedance relay (i.e., about 200 ms). For example, the last case
of Table III presents the algorithm response for an AG fault with
100 . This fault is identified inside the second protective
zone of the relay whose operation time is adjusted at 200 ms. It
should be considered that the higher the fault resistance, the less
the fault current. Therefore, the operation time of the distance
relay second zone is satisfactory for the case of very-high resistance faults.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper introduces an adaptive decision logic to improve
the performance of the distance relaying of transmission lines.
The proposed method incorporates the fault condition into the
final decision logic through a weighting procedure, in which
higher weights are considered for the faults with a higher degree of certainty. Higher weights are assigned to the measured
impedance samples which are located at interior areas of the
relay zone. The trajectory of the impedance curve measured by
the relay is also used to enhance the distance relay operation. In
the case of rapid oscillations in the measured impedance curve,
the corresponding weights are reduced to avoid the relay maloperation due to the transient response of the phasor estimation algorithm or invalid data input. A high-set overcurrent relay

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 26, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2011

Majid Sanaye-Pasand (M98SM05) received the

electrical engineering degree from the University
of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 1988, and the M.Sc. and
Ph.D. degrees from the University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada, in 1994 and 1998, respectively.
Currently, he is a Professor and Associate Head at
the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Tehran, where he is also with the Control and Intelligent Processing Center of Excellence.
His areas of interest include power system analysis
and control, digital protective relays, and application
of artificial intelligence.

Peyman Jafarian (S11) received the B.Sc. and

M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering (Hons.) from
the K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran,
Iran, in 2003 and 2006, respectively, and the Ph.D.
degree from the University of Tehran, Tehran, in
2010.
His research interests include power system protection and control, digital protective relays, and realtime control of flexible ac transmission systems.