Double Circuit Transmission Line Fault Distance Location using
Artificial Neural Network
Anamika Jain and A.S.Thoke
Department of Electrical Engineering
National Institute of Technology
Raipur, India
anamika_jugnu@yahoo.com, asthoke@yahoo.co.in
AbstractDistance relays used for protection of transmission
lines have problems of under-reach, over-reach and mal-
operation due to high impedance faults. Further the problem is
compounded when the distance relays are used for protection
of double circuit transmission lines due to effect of zero
sequence mutual coupling. Different types of faults on a
protected transmission line should be located correctly. This
paper presents a single neural network for fault distance
location for all the ten types of faults (3 LG, 3 LLG, 3 LL, 1
LLL) in both the circuits of a double circuit transmission line
fed from sources at both the end. This technique uses only one
end data and accurate fault distance location is achieved after
one cycle from the inception of fault. The proposed Artificial
Neural Network (ANN) based Fault Distance Locator uses
fundamental components of three phase current signals of both
the circuits & three phase voltage signals to learn the hidden
relationship in the input patterns. An improved performance is
obtained once the neural network is trained suitably, thus
performing correctly when faced with different system
parameters and conditions i.e. varying fault type, fault
location, fault resistance, fault inception angle, presence of
mutual coupling and remote source infeed.
Keywords- Artificial Neural Network; Double circuit fault
distance location; Mutual coupling; Transmission line; High
impedance fault
I. INTRODUCTION
Fault location estimation is a desirable feature in any
protective relaying scheme for transmission lines. By
accurately locating a fault, the amount of time spent by line
repair crews in searching for the fault can be kept at a
minimum. Locating the fault on the transmission line
accelerates line restoration & maintains system stability.
Different types of algorithms for finding fault location on
EHV/UHV transmission lines have been developed and
proposed over the years. These algorithms may be broadly
classified as (i) those computing power frequency current
and voltage phasors to find impedance and hence fault
location [1, 2], (ii) those using differential equations of line
and estimating line parameters [3] and (iii) those based on
the traveling wave which uses one terminal data or two
terminal data [4]-[5]. Most of the reactance-based schemes
suffer from under reach due to high impedance fault and
978-1-4244-5612-3/09/$26.00 2009
c IEEE
R. N. Patel
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
S. S. College of Engg. and Technology
Bhilai, India
ramnpatel@gmail.com
over reach due to DC offset current. Also these schemes
require remote end information if the transmission line is
fed from sources at both the ends. These are required to
minimize the errors due to the remote end infeed and load
flow variations. Travelling wave schemes have problems
with faults close to the bus and faults with close-to-zero
fault inception angle.
One of the new tools recently introduced into power
system protection is Artificial Neural Networks (ANN).
ANN is powerful in pattern recognition, classification and
generalization. Neural Networks are useful for power system
applications because they can be trained with off-line data.
ANNs possess excellent features such as noise immunity,
robustness and fault tolerance. Therefore, the decision made
by an ANN-based relay will not be seriously affected by
variations in system parameters. Consequently, various
ANN-based algorithms have been investigated and
implemented in power systems in recent years [6]. Faulty
phase selection and distance location using neural network
for single circuit transmission lines has been reported in [7].
Fault classification for double-circuit lines using self-
organization mapping feature neural network is presented in
[8], however it does not locate the faults. The work presented
in [9] deals with the compensation of fault resistance using
ANN for determination of location of fault. A single line to
ground fault location method employing wavelet fuzzy
neural network in the distribution lines of an industrial
system is proposed in [10], other types of fault have not been
considered. An adaptive distance protection of double circuit
line using zero sequence thevenin equivalent impedance and
compensation factor for mutual coupling is presented in [11].
Back propagation method based on Levenberg-Marquardt
optimisation technique is used to locate the faults in [12]. In
a companion paper [13], fault distance location for single
line to ground faults on double circuit transmission lines
using neural network has been reported.
This paper presents an application of artificial neural
network for fault distance location in a double end fed
double circuit transmission line for all the ten types of shunt
faults using only one terminal data considering the effects of
mutual coupling, remote source infeed, varying fault type,
fault location, fault resistance and fault inception angle. The
13
algorithm employs the fundamental components of three
phase voltages and the six phase currents of the two parallel
lines at one end only. The performance of the proposed
scheme has been investigated by a number of offline tests.
The simulation results show that all the ten type of faults
can be correctly located after one cycle from the inception
of fault. The algorithm is immune to effects of mutual
coupling, remote source infeed, variation in fault type, fault
location, fault resistance and fault inception angle. The
technique does not require communication link to retrieve
the remote end data and nor zero sequence current
compensation for healthy phases. Such comprehensive work
has not been reported earlier for fault distance location of
double circuit line.
II. POWER SYSTEM NETWORK SIMULATION
The system studied is composed of 220KV double circuit
transmission line 100 km in length, connected to sources at
each end; its single line diagram is shown in Fig. 1 [13].
Short circuit capacity of the equivalent thevenin sources on
two sides of the line is considered to be 1.25 GVA., Xs/Rs
ratio of source is 10. The transmission line is simulated using
distributed parameter line model using MATALB 7.01
software as shown in Fig. 2. Double circuit transmission line
parameters are shown in Table I.
Figure 1. Single line diagram of power system under study.
TABLE I. DOUBLE CIRCUIT LINE PARAMETERS
Positive sequence resistance R1, /KM 0.01809
Zero sequence resistance R0, /KM 0.2188
Zero sequence mutual resistance R0m, /KM 0.20052
Positive sequence inductance L1, H/KM 0.00092974
Zero sequence inductance L0, H/KM 0.0032829
Zero sequence mutual inductance L0m, H/KM 0.0020802
Positive sequence capacitance C1, F/KM 1.2571e-008
Zero sequence capacitance C0, F/KM 7.8555e-009
Zero sequence mutual capacitance C0m, F/KM -2.0444e-009
For example a double phase to ground fault A1B1N-
double phase to ground fault occurs at 10 KM from end S on
circuit 1 of the configuration shown in Fig.1 at 60 ms with
0 (zero) fault resistance and i=0 (zero degree) fault
inception angle and s= 45, pre-fault power flow angle. The
three phase voltage and current waveforms is shown in Fig.
3. As expected, a current is also induced in the A2 & B2-
phases of healthy circuit 2 due to zero sequence mutual
14 2009 World Congress on Nature & Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC 2009)
coupling between the two circuits. We can see that DC offset
current is also present in the phase current signals. Due to
this the conventional relays detect the healthy phases also to
be faulty and may thus mal-operate. This is not desirable,
only the faulted circuit should be disconnected while power
continues to flow through the healthy circuit with reduced
power transfer. Further, when high fault resistance is
involved in ground faults at far end of the line, the
conventional distance relays under-reach, and over-reach due
to the effect of weakly damped DC offset current and/or
remote end source infeed to fault branch.
Preprocessing is useful method that significantly reduces
the size of the neural network and improves the performance
and speed of training process. Three phase voltage and six
current input signals were sampled at a sampling frequency
of 1 kHz and further processed by simple 2nd-order low-pass
Butterworth filter with cut-off frequency of 400 Hz.
Subsequently, one full cycle Discrete Fourier transform is
used to calculate the fundamental components of voltages
and currents. The input signals were normalized in order to
make the ANN input level (1) [14].
III. ANN BASED FAULT DISTANCE LOCATOR
The basic procedure used to implement a neural network
in the fault distance location algorithm in double circuit
transmission line is described below.
A. Selecting the right architecture
One factor in determining the right size and structure for
the network is the number of inputs and outputs that it must
have. The lower the number of inputs, the smaller the
network can be. However, sufficient input data to
characterize the problem must be ensured. Only the
magnitudes recorded at one end of the line are used. The
inputs to distance relays are mainly the voltages and
currents. Hence the network inputs chosen here are the
magnitudes of the fundamental components (50 Hz) of three
phase voltages and six currents measured at the relay
location. As the basic task of fault location is to determine
the distance to the fault, the distance to the fault, in km with
regard to the total length of the line, should be the only
output provided by the fault location network. Thus the
input X and the output Y for the fault location network are:
X = [Va ,Vb ,Vc , I a1 , I b1 , I c1 , I a 2 , I b 2 , I c 2 ]
(1)
Y = Lf[ ] (2)
The major issue in the design of ANN architecture is to
ensure that when choosing the number of hidden layers and
number of neurons in the hidden layers, its attribute for
generalization is well maintained. In this respect, since there
is no parametric/theoretic guidance available, the design has
to be based on a heuristic approach [15].
 Figure 2. Power system model simulated in MATLAB 7.5 Simulink software.
3 Phase Phase Voltage (Volts)

5
x 10
2
Ref.
1 Va
Vb
0 Vc
-1

-2
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 150
Faulty ckt-1 (Amp.)

Ref.
Phase Currents of

5000
Ia1
Ib1
0 Ic1

-5000
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 150
of Healthy ckt-2 (Amp.)

1500
Ref.
1000
Phase Currents

Ia2
500 Ib2
0 Ic2
-500
-1000
-1500
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 150
Time in ms

Figure 3. Three phase voltages & currents during double phase to ground fault on ckt-1 at 10 KM from SS-1 end at 60 ms, Rf=0, i=0 and s= 45.

The ANN architecture, including the number of inputs to functions, the tansig function was chosen as transfer function
the network and the number of neurons in hidden layers, is for the hidden layer, and pure linear function purelin in the
determined empirically by experimenting with various output layer.
network configurations. Through a series of trial and error,
and modifications of the ANN architecture, the best
IW{1,1} LW{2,1}
performance is achieved by using a three layer neural
network with 9 inputs and 1 output as shown in Fig. 4. The
number of neurons for the hidden layer is 40. The final b{1} b{2}
determination of the neural network requires the relevant
transfer functions in the layers to be established. After 9 Inputs 40 Neurons 1 Output
analysing the various possible combinations of transfer Figure 4. Structure of ANN based fault distance locator.
functions normally used, such as logsig, tansig and linear

2009 World Congress on Nature & Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC 2009) 15
B. Learning rule selection
The back-propagation learning rule is used in perhaps
8090% of practical applications. Improvement techniques
can be used to make back-propagation more reliable and
faster. The back-propagation learning rule can be used to
adjust the weights and biases of networks to minimize the
sum-squared error of the network. This is done by
continually changing the values of the network weights and
biases in the direction of steepest descent with respect to
error. The simple back-propagation method is slow because
it requires small learning rates for stable learning,
improvement techniques such as momentum and adaptive
learning rate or an alternative method to gradient descent,
LevenbergMarquardt optimisation, can be used. Various Figure 5. Training of ANN based fault distance locator for all the ten
techniques were applied to the different network types of faults in both the circuits of transmission line.
architectures, and it was concluded that the most suitable
epochs to 4.66127e-04 in around half an hour time as shown
training method for the architecture selected was based on
the LevenbergMarquardt (Trainlm) optimization technique. in Fig. 5. Once the network is trained sufficiently and
suitably with large training data sets, the network gives the
C. Training process correct output after one cycle from the inception of fault.
To train the network, a suitable number of representative
examples of the relevant phenomenon must be selected so
that the network can learn the fundamental characteristics of IV. TEST RESULT OF ANN BASED FAULT DISTANCE
the problem and, once training is completed, provide correct LOCATOR
outputs in new situations not used during training. To obtain Once training was completed, ANN based Fault distance
enough examples to train the network, a software package locator was then extensively tested using independent data
MATLAB 7.01 is used. Using SIMULINK &
sets consisting of fault scenarios never used previously in
SIMPOWERSYSTEM toolbox of MATLAB all the ten
types of fault at different fault locations between 0-100% of training. For different faults of the validation/test data set,
line length and fault inception angles 0 & 90 have been fault type, fault location, fault resistance and fault inception
simulated as shown below in Table II. The total number of angle were changed to investigate the effects of these factors
ground faults simulated are 12x10x2x3 = 720 & 8x10x2 = on the performance of the proposed algorithm. The network
160 thus total fault cases are 880 and from each fault cases was tested and performance was validated by presenting all
ten numbers of post fault samples have been extracted to the ten types of fault cases with varying fault locations
form the training data set for neural network. Thus the total (Lf=0-90KM), fault resistances (Rf=0-100) and fault
number of patterns generated for training are 8800 patterns. inception angles (i=0-360). As shown in table III all the
TABLE II. TRAINING PATTERNS GENERATION
faults cases are correctly located. Fig. 6-9 shows the output
of the fault distance locator for different types of faults. It is
Parameter Set value clear from these figures that all the faults were correctly
LG: A1N, A2N, B1N, B2N, C1N, C2N
LL: A1B1, A2B2, B1C1, B2C2, A1C1, located after one cycle time from the inception of fault.
Fault type
A2C2 Table III shows some of the test results of ANN based
LLG: A1B1N, A2B2N, B1C1N, fault locator under different fault conditions. It can be seen
B2C2N, A1C1N, A2C2N
LLL: A1B1C1, A2B2C2 that all results are correct with reasonable accuracy. At
various locations different types of faults were tested to find
Fault location (Lf in KM) 1, 10, 20, 30, 80 and 90 km
out the maximum deviation of the estimated distance Lf
Fault inception angle (i) 0 & 90 measured from the relay location, from the actual fault
location La. Then the resulted estimated error e is
Fault resistance (Rf) 0, 50 & 100
expressed as a percentage of total line length L as:
Pre-fault power flow angle
45
(s)
L f La
e= 100%
The ANN based fault distance locator was trained using L (3)
LevenbergMarquardt training algorithm using neural
network toolbox of Matlab. This learning strategy converges In all the fault cases, the results have shown that the errors
quickly and the mean squared error (mse) decreases in 300 in locating the fault are less than -7% to +1.97%.

16 2009 World Congress on Nature & Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC 2009)
 TABLE III. TEST RESULTS OF ANN BASED FAULT LOCATOR
Fault Fault
Fault Calculated
Fault Inception Location Error
Resistance Output
type angle La e (%)
Rf () Lf (KM)
i () (KM)
A1N 45 80 67 64.470 -2.53
A2N 90 90 77 76.447 -0.553
B1N 225 90 88 87.024 -0.976
B2N 270 80 89 88.624 -0.376
C1N 360 95 95 92.405 -2.595
C2N 180 70 38 35.449 -2.551
Figure 6. Test result for B1-N fault at 89Km source S end with A1B1 135 - 5 4.435 -0.565
Rf=80, i=270 (75ms fault inception time) & s=45. A2B2 0 - 15 15.066 0.066
B1C1 360 - 33 33.181 0.181
B2C2 135 - 90 89.490 -0.51
C1A1 90 - 22 22.144 0.144
C2A2 315 - 64 64.545 0.545
A1B1N 135 30 85 82.955 -2.045
A2B2N 45 60 57 56.459 -0.541
B1C1N 0 10 35 34.606 -0.394
B2C2N 270 80 89 88.632 -0.368
C1A1N 315 0 4 5.3833 1.3833
C1A1N 225 30 58 50.838 -7.162
C2A2N 90 40 24 20.105 -3.895
C2A2N 360 95 63 62.551 -0.449
A2B2C2 180 - 15 12.418 -2.582
Figure 7. Test result for A1C1 fault at 22Km from source S end at A2B2C2 360 - 85 86.973 1.973
i=90 (65ms fault inception time) & s=45.
V. COMPARISON WITH THE EXISTANG SCHEMES
The salient features of some of the existing ANN based
fault location schemes and the proposed scheme are
presented in Table IV. The proposed scheme has several
advantages : a single ANN for all the ten types of faults in
both the circuits, wider range of fault resistance and fault
inception angle, remote source infeed and mutual coupling
effects considered. Accuracy of the algorithm is good in
most of the fault cases as shown in Table III except in one
case wherein it is 7%. Response time is 1 cycle comparable
to the conventional distance relay.
Figure 8. Test result for A1B1N fault at 57KM from source S end at VI. CONCLUSIONS
Rf=60 , i=45 (62.5 ms fault inception time) & s=45.
An accurate neural network based algorithm for fault
distance location on double circuit transmission line fed
from sources at both ends is presented covering all 20 types
of faults in both the circuits. The algorithm employs the
fundamental components of three line voltages and the six
line currents of the two parallel lines at one end only. The
algorithm determines fault distance location after one cycle
from the inception of fault. The algorithm effectively
eliminates the effect of varying fault type, fault location,
fault resistance, fault inception angle, mutual coupling and
remote source infeed. The performance of the proposed
scheme has been investigated by a number of offline tests.
Figure 9. Test result for A2B2C2 fault at 85KM from source S end at
i=360 (80ms fault inception time) & s=45. The complexity of all the ten types of faults in both the

2009 World Congress on Nature & Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC 2009) 17
circuit of line, fault locations (0-90%), fault inception angles The technique does not require communication link to
(0-360) and fault resistances (0-100) are considered. The retrieve the remote end data and nor zero sequence current
simulation results show that all the ten types of faults can be compensation for healthy phases.
correctly located after one cycle from the inception of fault.

TABLE IV. COMPARISION OF NEURAL NETWORK BASED FAULT LOCATION SCHEMES

Schemes Fault locator Line Fault resistance Fault Inception Other Factors Response time
suggested by inputs configuration Rf range () angle i () considered and Accuracy

Other types of Response time not

Single circuit line faults and wide indicated and
R.N. Mahanty and Samples of 3-
for LG & LL 0-200 0-90 variation in error is 6%.
P.B. Gupta [16] phase V and I
faults only inception angle
not onsidered.

Other types of Response time not

Samples of 50Hz
faults and indicated and
A.J. Mazon et al compoents of 3- Double circuit line
0-20 - variation in error is 0.19%
[12] phase V and I of for LG faults only
inception angle
each circuits
not onsidered.

Bhavesh R. Bhalja Mutual coupling, Not indicated

p, q and Double circuit line
& R.P. 0-200 - remote source
resistance for LG faults only
Maheshwari [17] infeed.

Double circuit line Mutual coupling, 1 cycle time from

Samples of 50Hz
for all 10 types of remote source inception of faults
compoents of 3-
Proposed scheme faults in both the 0-100 0-360 infeed and all 10 and % error is -
phase V and I of
circuits (total 20 types of faults in 7% to +1.97%.
each circuits
types of fault) both the ckts.

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18 2009 World Congress on Nature & Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC 2009)