A PMU-based Fault Location Identification Using
Principal Component Analysis
Rui Ma
Department of Electrical Eng. and Computer Science
Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York, USA
Abstract—Accurate and rapid fault localization for transmission
line faults is essential for power system protection and mainte-
nance. In this paper, a PMU-based algorithm for locating trans-
mission line faults is proposed. By employing Principal Compo-
nent Analysis (PCA) method on line current time series data, fault
region is firstly identified. The pre-fault and during-fault positive
sequence voltage measurements are then utilized to estimate un-
known bus voltages through least square method and therefore
determine exact fault location within the fault region. Different
fault resistances and four types of fault, namely, single line to
ground fault, double line to ground fault, line to line fault and
three-phase balanced faults are used to evaluate the effectiveness
of the method on the IEEE 14-bus system as well as the IEEE 30-
bus system. Additionally, the impact of noise on PMU measure-
ments is investigated to assess the robustness of the proposed
method.
Index Terms--Fault location, Principal Component Analysis
(PCA), Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs).
I. INTRODUCTION
Accurate transmission line fault localization is essential for
power system protection and maintenance. Protective relays
(PRs) and circuit breakers (CBs) are deployed for real-time
power system operation to locate transmission line faults, how-
ever, malfunction of PRs and CBs might cause erroneous de-
tection and localization of transmission line faults. Therefore,
an alternate fault localization methodology needs to be devel-
oped to avoid the consequence of equipment malfunction.
Line fault localization approaches are mainly categorized as
the impedance-based, travelling wave-based, and machine
learning-based methods [1]. Authors in [2]–[6] use one-termi-
nal, two-terminal, or multi-terminal impedance-based methods
to locate transmission line faults. In the one-terminal method,
the measurements from only one side of the transmission line
are utilized to determine fault location [2]. Authors in [3] use
one side of each branch’s voltage and current symmetrical com-
ponents to locate line faults. However, each transmission line
has to be observed by PMUs. Compared to the one-terminal
methodology, two-terminal and multi-terminal algorithms im-
prove the estimated accuracy of detecting fault locations [1].
Authors in [4] utilize two-terminal synchronized voltage and
current phasors to first find faulted lines, and then calculate ex-
act fault location within that line. Dutta et al. in [5] use the sign
of the two-terminal instantaneous power on the faulted line to
classify fault types and locate fault location. Authors in [6] pro-
pose using voltage phasors of two ends of the faulted line and
the neighboring bus voltages to locate faults. However, all
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant No.
1600058.
978-1-7281-1981-6/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
Sara Eftekharnejad
Department of Electrical Eng. and Computer Science
Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York, USA
buses have to be equipped with PMUs. A machine learning
classification method, i.e. space vector machine (SVM), is used
in [7] to address fault localization problems. By employing fast
Fourier transform (FFT) on the phase angle variations of each
voltage and current phasor measurements, FFT coefficients are
extracted and utilized by SVM to locate fault positions.
PMUs are capable of capturing transients and generating
synchronized voltage and current phasors with high resolution.
Therefore, PMU measurements have the potential to be used for
fault localization applications. In recent years, traveling wave-
based methods and wide area impedance-based methods have
been explored by researchers for this purpose. The traveling
wave-based method analyzes the transmission and reflection of
the fault waveform from each sensor to the fault point [8].
Based on the different propagation time from fault node to each
PMU, authors in [9] and [10] formulate a fault point estimation
method to identify fault location. One advantage of the travel-
ling wave method is the independence from the system topol-
ogy and the fault resistance [9]. However, the traveling wave
method requires PMUs to have an extremely high sampling fre-
quency such that accurate fault arriving times can be identified.
The wide area impedance-based method utilizes limited num-
ber of PMUs to locate the line faults. Jiang et al. in [2] propose
using limited positive sequence voltage phasors to first locate a
fault zone and then determine the fault location. However, the
fault location is found iteratively. Non-iterative methods are
discussed by authors in [11]–[13]. The least square method is
used to examine all transmission lines and estimate unknown
voltage and current phasors. The line with minimum estimation
error is the faulted line and the corresponding estimated fault
location is the actual fault location. To avoid examining all
transmission lines, Feng et al. in [13] formulate the fault loca-
tion problem as an optimization problem to determine the
faulted line and location. However, computation time is a con-
cern in solving the described optimization problem.
In this paper, a wide area impedance-based fault localiza-
tion approach is utilized to estimate fault location with a limited
number of PMUs. Based on the high sampling frequency fea-
ture of PMUs, pre-fault and during-fault synchronized positive
sequence voltage and current phasors are used to first identify
the fault region and then estimate fault location within the can-
didate fault region. After identifying the fault region, each line
in the candidate fault region is examined to eventually deter-
mine the fault location. The aforementioned method and its ap-
plication are explained in the following sections: Section II dis-
cusses the fault localization algorithm. A comprehensive fault
localization scheme consisting of fault region identification and
fault position calculation is explained in Section III. Section IV
evaluates the proposed method on two test beds with different
types of faults and different fault impedances.

II. FAULT LOCATION IDENTIFICATION ALGORITHM

In this section, line fault localization problem is addressed
by using synchronized positive sequence voltage measurements Fig. 1 Configuration of a single line to ground fault on line i-j for positive se-
obtained from PMUs. The fault location can be represented as quence network
a virtual bus during fault current calculations. Thus, a during-
fault nodal equation is constructed based on the superposition
 V1   0 
theorem [14]. Hence, a non-iterative fault localization approach  V   0 
is proposed by using a limited number of positive sequence  2  
voltage measurements and the linear least square method. Y fault         (8)
   
In an N-bus system, assume a single line to ground fault has  VN   0 
occurred on node f along line i-j, shown in Fig. 1. The distance  V f    I f 
   
from node i to f is xL while the distance from node j to f is (1-
x)L, where x is the distance ratio of fault location from bus i to where ∆ 1, … , , is the voltage change between pos-
f, and it is between zero to one. L is the length of the i-j line. itive sequence pre-fault and during-fault voltages at bus i, is
The impedance from node i to f is while the impedance the fault current. The negative sign of in (8) represents the
from node j to f is 1 , where is the impedance of fault current flowing out from the system. It is observed that
the i-j line. When a fault occurs on a transmission line, the fault most entries of column of are zeros except ith, jth
node can be treated as a virtual bus. Thus, the dimension of the and fth elements. Thus, by eliminating the ith, jth and fth rows
during-fault admittance matrix is increased by one, which is of matrix, (8) can be modified as follows:
given as:  V1 
 Y11  Y1i  Y1 j  Y1N 0
 Y11  Y1i  Y1 j  Y1N 0   V2  0 
  0   
 
             (9)
 Yi1  Yii'  Yij'  YiN Yif'  YN 1  YNi  YNj  YNN 0   VN  0 
   
   0  V f 
Y fault     
Y  Y ji'  Y jj'  Y jN Y jf'  where the dimension of the remaining admittance matrix is
 j1 
   0 2 1 . Since the last column of the remaining ad-
Y  YNi  YNj  YNN 0  mittance matrix in (9) are all zeros, the nodal equations can be
 N1  written as:
 0 0 Y fi' 0 Y fj' 0 0 Y ff' 
 Y11  Y1i  Y1 j  Y1N  0
 
Yij'  Yji'  0 (2)
    V    
*
(10)
1 YN1  YNi  YNj  YNN  0
Yif'  Y fi'  Yij (3)  
x
V *   V1 V  VN 
T
(11)
1
Y jf'  Y fj'  Yij (4) ∗
where ∆ is the voltage deviation column vector without the
1 x virtual bus. The dimension of the remaining modified admit-
1 x tance matrix is thus 2 .
Yii'  Yii  Yij (5)
x Assume the system has m (2 ) number of PMUs.
x Therefore, the voltage change column vector ∆ ∗ can be
Y jj'  Y jj  Yij (6) grouped into two parts. One is the voltage changes that are ob-
1 x
served by PMUs. The other one is the changes that need to be
1 estimated. By regrouping the columns of the remaining admit-
Y ff'  y ff  Yij (7)
x 1  x  tance matrix and the rows of ∆ ∗ , the remaining regrouped
nodal equations are given as:
where is the during-fault positive sequence admittance
0 
matrix, is the pre-fault admittance of line i-j and is the  V A   
fault admittance. YA YNA        (12)
 VNA   0 
 
Since a positive sequence network can be utilized to analyze
all types of faults [15], positive sequence voltages and positive  Y11  Y1m 
sequence admittance matrix are employed in this paper to locate YA       (13)
faults. According to the superposition theorem, the during-fault
nodal admittance equation can be written as [14]: YN 1  YNm 
  Y1 m 1  Y1N  possible to determine the fault region by analyzing the dynam-
  ics of each PMU data. By employing the Principal Component
YNA      (14) Analysis (PCA) method on PMU-observed branch current time
Y  YNN  series data, a fault region can be identified.
 N  m 1 
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) projects the data onto
V A   V  Vm 
T
(15) the principal subspace, which is a lower dimensional linear
VNA   Vm 1  VN 
T
(16) space, such that the variance of the data is maximized [17]. The
dynamics of the data can be analyzed by transferring the data
where ∆ is the voltage change vector that can be measured by into a combination of Principal Components (PCs). By extract-
PMUs, and is the admittance matrix corresponding to the ing the first Principle Component (1st PC) of each observed line
known voltage deviations. ∆ is the voltage deviation vector current data, the lines with the top three largest 1st PCs are se-
that is not available, is the admittance matrix corresponding lected as the candidate transmission lines. In this paper, it is as-
to the unknown voltage changes. Hence, the reordered nodal sumed that all buses are observed by PMUs. Therefore, the fault
equation can be formulated as follows: region is composed of the candidate lines in addition to the lines
YNA  VNA  A (17) immediately connected to those lines.

A  Y A   V A (18) B. Fault location determination

It can be observed that the number of rows is larger than the In stage two, all candidate branches are examined to deter-
number of columns in , causing (17) to be an overdeter- mine the exact fault location. It has been pointed out that the
mined equation. By employing the linear least square method, correct fault branch will have the smallest estimation residue
the unknown voltage changes and estimation residue are given in Section II. However, only relying on the smallest estimation
as follows: residue to determine fault position is not sufficient since the
measurements are contaminated by noise and parameters are
VNA  YNA YNA  YNA
T T 1
A (19) complex numbers. Thus, three rules are utilized to determine
correct faulted line as well as the exact fault location. Assume
R  YNA  VNA  A 
2
(20) candidate line i-j is examined and the estimated fault distance
x is calculated. If the following three rules are satisfied, line i-
where ∆ is the estimated unknown voltage deviation vector, j is the faulted line and x is the fault location.
and R is the estimation residue of the least square method. It
should be noted that the estimation residue is the smallest if the  Rule1: The fault distance x should be within zero to one;
examined line is the actual faulted line. After estimating the un-  Rule2: If line i-j is the actual faulted line, the least square
known voltage deviation, all bus voltage changes, which is de- estimation residue is smaller than a threshold, :
noted as ∆ , are obtained except the virtual bus. Observing the Rline i  j   (23)
ith and jth rows of the yields:
 1 x 1 
 Rule3: In order to precisely identify the faulted line and im-
 Yi1  Yii  x Yij  0  YiN
x
Yij  prove the robustness of this approach against noise, the
  PMU-observed branch currents are employed to help deter-
Y  x 1
0  Y jj  Yij  Y jN Yij  (21) mine the real faulted line. Based on the known voltage
 1  x 
j1
1 x changes, unknown bus voltage changes are estimated by us-
 V   0  ing (19). Thus, the estimated current change of PMU-
   observed branch m-n is calculated as follows:
 V f   0 
I line m  n   Vm  Vn  Ymn
'
Solving for the distance x from (21) yields: (24)
where ∆ is the estimated change of current in line m-n,
Y j1  Y jN  V
x (22) ∆ and ∆ are the estimated voltage changes on bus m
Yi1  Y j1  YiN  Y jN  V and bus n, and is in the m-nth element of .
By comparing the real current changes obtained from
III. FAULT LOCATION IDENTIFICATION SCHEME PMUs with the estimated current changes, the faulted line
can be selected among the candidate branches. The line with
A computationally efficient, two-stage fault localization minimum estimation error is the faulted branch, which is ex-
scheme is proposed in this paper that is described next. plained in (25):
k
A. Fault region identification
  I  I p 
2
p
In a large power system, examining all transmission lines to p 1
Eline i  j  (25)
determine a fault location is computationally challenging. Thus, k
in the first stage, the fault region is identified. This significantly
reduces the computation time. When a fault occurs in a power where is the mean squared error (MSE) of current
system, all PMUs record the fault transients while the variation changes of the candidate faulted line i-j, k is the number of
of the dynamics is different [16], which is due to the different PMU-observed branches, ∆ and ∆ ̅ are the real and esti-
distances between PMUs and the fault location. Therefore, it is mated current change of line p.
 IV. CASE STUDIES
The proposed wide area fault localization approach has
been studied on the IEEE 14-bus system and the IEEE 30-bus
system. Four different types of fault, namely, single line to
ground fault (SLG), double line to ground fault (DLG), line to
line fault (LL) and three phase balanced fault (3-ph) under dif-
ferent fault impedances are investigated. Computer simulations
are used to simulate faults on each transmission line to verify
the method’s effectiveness. The impact of noise is also investi-
gated to evaluate the robustness of the developed method.

A. Fault Localization on IEEE 14-bus System

Formally, fault location can be estimated with two voltage Fig. 2 1st PC of each PMU observed branch current for a 3-phase fault one
measurements. However, two measurements are not enough to line 6-11 and line 2-3
overcome measurement noise and guarantee the accuracy of the
estimated fault location. Thus, four PMUs, which provide 4 TABLE I
CANDIDATE BRANCHES FOR A THREE PHASE FAULT ON LINE 6-11
voltage phasors and 10 current phasors, are deployed on buses
Candidate Estimated Estimation MSE of current
2, 8, 10 and 13 to make the 14-bus system observable. A 3- Branch Location Residue changes
phase fault is simulated in the middle of line 6-11. It is assumed 7-8 0.6145 0.0507 0.2548
that the sampling frequency of PMUs is 60 frames per second 7-9 1.5264 0.0499 0.2520
(fps). Thus, for the first stage, a length of 5 cycles’ current time 9-14 0.8920 0.0058 0.4898
series data, i.e. 0.083s, is utilized to extract 1st PCs of each 9-10 0.4058 0.0549 0.1683
PMU-observed branch current. Specifically, 2 cycles occur be- 10-11 1.5265 4.47e-07 1.22e-04
6-11 0.5003 4.47e-07 7.02e-07
fore the fault triggering point and 3 cycles are after the fault
triggering point. By comparing the 1st PC of each available line TABLE II
current time series data, which is plotted in Fig. 2, candidate CANDIDATE BRANCHES FOR A THREE PHASE FAULT ON LINE 2-3
faulted lines are selected. The top three candidate PMU- Candidate Estimated Estimation MSE of current
observed branches are found in line 9-10, line 10-11, and 7-8. Branch Location Residue changes
Hence, the fault region consists of five buses, (7, 8, 9, 10 and 1-2 0.4501 6.32e-05 0.0329
1-5 0.1051 6.32e-05 2.8405
11), and six suspicious lines, (7-8, 7-9, 9-10, 9-14, 10-11 and 6- 2-3 0.2028 3.31e-08 2.86e-04
11). After obtaining the suspicious fault branches, the fault lo- 2-4 0.0990 3.31e-08 3.1638
cation is determined and verified through three rules as dis- 2-5 0.1042 6.32e-05 2.8014
cussed in Section III. Results for each candidate branch are 3-4 0.7600 3.31e-08 2.2899
listed and compared in Table I. It can be observed that line 6- 7-8 0.6465 0.8289 0.5266
7-9 1.4897 0.9274 0.3328
11 is the fault branch and the fault location is at the 50.03% of
the branch from bus 6, where the error is only 0.03%. Another TABLE III
three-phase balanced fault is simulated on line 2-3 and at 20% AVERAGE FAULT LOCALIZATION ERROR FOR FOUR TYPES OF FAULTS AND
distance from bus 2. The 1st PC of each PMU observed branch THREE FAULT IMPEDANCES FOR IEEEE 14-BUS SYSTEM
is computed and plotted in Fig. 2. Lines 2-3, 1-2 and 2-5 have Fault Type
Fault Impedance (per unit)
the top three largest 1st PCs. Therefore, the fault region is com- 0 0.25 0.5
posed of four buses (1, 2, 3 and 5) and the lines connected to 3-ph 0.1664 % 0.1555 % 0.2056 %
SLG 0.3651 % 0.3859 % 0.3859 %
them. Examining each candidate branch, summarized in Table LL 0.1669 % 0.1710 % 0.1966 %
II, shows the estimated fault location error is only 0.28%. DLG 0.1699 % 0.1786 % 0.1673 %
Next, SLG, LL, 3-ph and DLG faults, are simulated in the
assumed to be equipped with PMUs and 27 current phasor
middle of each transmission line. Three different fault imped-
measurements are observed. A 3-phase fault is simulated in the
ances are compared to analyze the impact of fault impedance
middle of line 2-6. The 1st PC of each available current time
and the average fault localization error series data, yields a fault region of buses 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8 and

is calculated. The results, listed in Table III, show that the fault the lines connected to these six buses. Fault localization results
localization method can precisely locate fault position regard- are given in Table IV. It can be observed that only the estimated
less of fault type and impedance. The fault impedance will fault location on line 2-6 satisfies the three rules in Section III
slightly decrease the estimation accuracy. and the estimated location is 50%, which is the same as the ac-
tual location. All four types of faults are simulated in the middle
B. Fault Localization on IEEE 30-bus System of each transmission line with three different fault impedances
In this section, a larger system is employed to validate the in IEEE 30-bus system. The average estimation error, given in
efficiency of the localization approach. The IEEE 30-bus sys- Table V, which corroborates the results shown in Table III.
tem has three radial buses, buses 11, 13, 26. Hence, three PMU
C. Existence of Measurement Noise
have to be placed on the radial buses to ensure the correct esti-
mation of the fault location on lines connected to the radial The amount of noise present in PMU measurements affects
buses. Hence, buses 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19, 23, 26 and 29 are the accuracy of the proposed fault localization approach. Thus,
 TABLE IV and successfully identifies fault locations of different types of
CANDIDATE BRANCHES FOR A THREE PHASE FAULT ON LINE 2-6 faults regardless of fault impedances. Additionally, as shown in
Candidate Estimated Estimation MSE of current the case studies, this method is robust against measurement
Branch Location Residue changes
noise. It can be concluded that the PMU-based fault localization
1-2 1.4043 0.0202 0.2702
1-3 1.1414 0.0066 0.0564
method provides a fast detection tool that can be used to inform
2-4 0.7784 0.0042 0.0258 the operators of the exact fault location and therefore improve
2-5 0.0036 0.0306 0.0205 the situational awareness of the power systems.
2-6 0.5000 3.16e-08 1.81e-07
5-7 1.5690 0.0424 0.0903
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