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Artificial Intelligent Application to Power System Protection

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 Artificial Intelligent Application to Power System Protection
M.M. Saha
Substation Automation Division
ABB Automation Products AB
SE-721 59 Västerås, SWEDEN
Abstract: The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
methods in power system protection has been addressed in
this paper. Particular emphasis has been put on Artificial
Neural Networks (ANN) and Fuzzy Logic (FL). Several
novel concepts have been introduced including ANN ap-
plication to CT and CVT transients correction, fuzzy crite-
ria signals, fuzzy settings and multi-criteria decision mak-
ing for digital relays. Attached examples illustrate applica-
tion of ANN and FL techniques to resolve the selected re-
laying problems such as the fault classification or CT and
CVT dynamic error correction. Differential protection for
power transformers is selected as an important example to
show efficiency of the proposed concepts of FL and ANN
application.
I. INTRODUCTION
The microprocessor technology brings unquestionable
improvements of the protection relays- criteria signals are
estimated in a shorter time; input signals are filtered-out
more precisely; it is easy to apply sophisticated corrections;
the hardware is standardized and may communicate with
other protection and control systems; relays are capable of
self-monitoring. All this, however, did not make a major
breakthrough in power system protection as far as security,
dependability and speed of operation are considered. The
key reason behind this is that the principles used by digital
relays blindly reproduce the criteria known for decades.
The relaying task, however, may be approached as a pat-
tern recognition problem - by monitoring its inputs, the relay
classifies on-going transients between internal faults and all
the other conditions. Or, the protective relaying may be con-
sidered as a decision making problem - the relay should de-
cide whether to trip or retrain itself from tripping. This ob-
servation directly leads to AI application in power system
protection [1-4]. Practically, it includes the artificial neural
network approach (pattern recognition), as well as the expert
system and fuzzy logic methods (decision making) [5-8].
This paper briefly reviews the general problems and con-
straints in power system protection and presents the basics of
AI methods as applied to protective relaying. After general
presentation of the problem (Section II), a brief description
of the AI methods is given (Section III). Some examples of
the AI approach to power system protection are presented in
Section IV and V. The test results are also included in the
paper.
SAHA M.M., ROSOŁOWSKI E. and IŻYKOWSKI J.: "Artificial Intelligent Application to Power System Protection".
NPSC 2000 - Eleventh National Power Systems Conference, Bangalore, India, 19-22 Dec. 2000. Vol. 2, pp. 595-600.
E. Rosolowski J. Izykowski
Department of Electrical Engineering
Wroclaw University of Technology
50-370 Wroclaw, POLAND
II. PROBLEMS IN POWER SYSTEM PROTECTION
The problems result mainly from the trade-off between
the security demand (no false trippings), and the speed of
operation and the dependability (no missing operations) re-
quirements. The more secure is the relay (both the algorithm
and its particular settings), the more it tends to misoperate or
operate slowly. And vice versa, the faster is the relay, the
more it tends to operate falsely. The problems listed below
reflect the current practice in power system protection.
There are basically two ways to mitigate the problem of
limited recognition power of the classical relaying princi-
ples. One of them is to improve and extend the measure-
ments available to a given relay (for example, optical CTs
for improvement and substation integration for extension).
The second way is to improve the recognition process itself
based on what is already available and either:
• search for the new relaying principles, or
• apply several of known principles in one relay to im-
prove the recognition, or
• apply correction of the CT and CVT transient error, or
• improve a type of fault determination by using of the
ANNs classifier, or
• use self-organizing algorithms such as ANNs to find out
automatically a protection principle.
It always takes certain time to estimate the criteria sig-
nals accurately enough to base the tripping decision on them.
Either they are measured fast or accurately. There is no per-
fect digital measuring algorithm that solves this well known
conflict between the speed and the accuracy. Either certain
pre-filtering is applied, or the basic algorithm uses longer
data window; or certain post-filtering is employed (or even a
combination of these three means). There is always a level
of uncertainty in the estimate of the criteria signal at the be-
ginning of a disturbance when the relay operation is mostly
wanted. In some situations, although unprecise, the value of
the criteria signal enables solid decision, but is other cases,
such as a fault at the end of the protection zone, the relay
must wait for more precise estimate of the criteria signals.
III. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE METHODS
AI is a subfield of computer science that investigates
how the though and action of human beings can be mim-
icked by machines [5]. Both the numeric, non-numeric and
symbolic computations are included in the area of AI. The
mimicking of intelligence includes not only the ability to
make rational decisions, but also to deal with missing data,
adapt to existing situations and improve itself in the long
time horizon based on the accumulated experience.
Three major families of AI techniques are considered to
be applied in modern power system protection [1,5]:
• Expert System Techniques (XPSs),
• Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs),
• Fuzzy Logic systems (FL).
A. Expert Systems
The first expert systems included a few heuristic rules
based on the expert's experience. In such systems, the
knowledge takes the form of so called production rules
written using the If... then... syntax (knowledge base). The
system includes also the facts which generally describe the
domain and the state of the problem to be solved (data base).
A generic inference engine uses the facts and the rules to de-
duce new facts which allow the firing of other rules. The
knowledge base is a collection of domain-specific knowl-
edge and the inference system is the logic component for
processing the knowledge base to solve the problem. This
process continues until the base of facts is saturated and a
conclusion has been reached (Fig.1). To guide the reasoning
and to be more efficient, these systems may incorporate
some strategies known as metaknowledge. Rule based sys-
tems represent still the majority of the existing expert sys-
tems.
There are few applications of XPS to power system pro-
tection reported, but all of them solve the off-line tasks such
as settings coordination, post-fault analysis and fault diagno-
sis [1]. As yet there is no application reported of the XPS
technique employed as a decision making tool in an on-line
operating protective relay. The basic reason for this is that
there is no extensive rule base that describes the reasoning
process applicable to protective relaying. Instead, only a few
rules or criteria are collected [9].
B. Artificial Neural Networks
The ANNs are very different from expert systems since
they do not need a knowledge base to work. Instead, they
have to be trained with numerous actual cases. An ANN is a
set of elementary neurons which are connected together in
different architectures organized in layers what is biologi-
cally inspired (Fig.2) [5]. An elementary neuron can be seen
Knowledge
Base
Inference
Solution
Engine
Data
Base
Fig.1. Simplified block diagram of an XPS.
like a processor which makes a simple non linear operation
of its inputs producing its single output. A weight (synapse)
is attached to each neuron and the training enables adjusting
of different weights according to the training set. The ANN
techniques are attractive because they do not require tedious
knowledge acquisition, representation and writing stages
and, therefore, can be successfully applied for tasks not fully
described in advance. The ANN are not programmed or
supported by a knowledge base as are Expert Systems. In-
stead they learn a response based on given inputs and a re-
quired output by adjusting the node weights and biases ac-
cordingly. The speed of processing, allowing real time ap-
plications, is also an advantage.
Since ANNs can provide excellent pattern recognition,
they are proposed by many researchers to perform different
tasks in power system relaying for signal processing and de-
cision making [2-5,7-8,10,12-13]. The common application
of the ANN technique assumes:
• The ANN is fed either with non-processed samples of the
input signals, or by features of those signals extracted
using certain measuring algorithms (or by a combina-
tion).
• The sliding data widow consisting of the recent and a
few historical samples of the signals, is fed to the ANN.
• The output from the ANN encodes the output decision
such as tripping command, type of fault, direction of
fault, etc.
• The training patterns exposed to the ANN cover the most
important operating conditions both internal faults and
other disturbances. Typically, only the selected window
positions are used for training.
• Additional pre- and post-processing may be applied.
The most widespread application of ANNs is in pattern
classification and associative memory where they can learn
to distinguish between classes of inputs and, therefore, they
can be successively used for decision making and phenom-
ena classification. A major problem with ANNs is that no
exact guide exists for the choice to the number of hidden
layers and neurons per hidden layer. On the other hand, the
ability to generalize is one of the main advantage of using
ANNs.
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Fig.2. Typical three-layer architecture of a feed-forward ANN.
C. Fuzzy Logic TABLE I. COMPARISON OF AI METHODS IN POWER SYSTEM PROTECTION
Feature Approach
With reference to Fig.3 the fuzzy logic approach to pro- XPS ANNs FL
tective relaying assumes [6]: Knowledge Expert knowl- Information Expert knowledge
• The criteria signals are fuzzified in order to account for used edge in the form
of rules, objects,
extracted from
the training set
in the form of pro-
tection criteria.
dynamic errors of the measuring algorithms. Thus, in- frames, etc. of cases.
stead of real numbers, the signals are represented by Trouble- Change of rules Difficult - the Convenient - the
fuzzy numbers. Since the fuzzification process provides shooting and required. internal signals internal signals are
improving a are almost im- understandable and
a special kind of flexible filtering, faster measuring al- relay possible to in- analyzable
gorithms that speed up the relays may be used. terpret.
Self-learning Possible. Natural. Possible.
• The thresholds for the criteria signals are also repre-
Handling un- Possible. Natural. Natural.
sented by fuzzy numbers to account for the lack of pre- clear cases
cision in dividing the space of the criteria signals be- Robustness Not-critical and Difficult to Not-critical and
tween the tripping and blocking regions. easy to ensure. ensure. easy to ensure.
• The fuzzy signals are compared with the fuzzy settings. Setting a Convenient. Large number
of simulation
Convenient. Both
knowledge and
relay
The comparison result is a fuzzy logic variable between required. simulation are used.
the Boolean absolute levels of truth and false. Computations Extensive. Dedicated Moderate.
hardware.
• Several relaying criteria are used in parallel. The criteria
are aggregated by means of formal multi-criteria deci- [1,6]. The relay presented in [11] uses 12 protection criteria
sion-making algorithms that allow the criteria to be which indicate the following transformer states (Fig.4):
weighted according to their reasoning ability. • Magnetizing inrush
• The tripping decision depends on multi-criteria evalua- • Stationary overexcitation of a core
tion of the status of a protected element. Additional de- • External faults combined with saturation of the CTs
cision factors may include the amount of available in- • External faults without saturation of the CTs.
formation, or the expected costs of relay maloperation. The relay uses fuzzy settings and multi-criteria decision
making methods and is self-set using the EMTP simulations.
The XPS, ANN and FL approaches have their own ad- The selected example concerning the 140/10.52kV, 5.86
vantages and limitations. Table I compares the basic features MVA three-phase two-winding transformer demonstrates
of these AI methods. both the relay stability and sensitivity. Fig.5 displays the dif-
ferential and through currents as well as the tripping signal
IV. APPLICATION TO POWER TRANSFORMER for the turn-to-turn internal fault occurring after 50ms of
PROTECTION transformer energizing and involving 16% turns of the Y-
As an examples authors have considered fuzzy logic and side winding on the column S. The relay activates at the be-
ANN application to differential transformer protection. The ginning of energizing but remains blocked during inrush
differential relaying principle in the case of a power trans- conditions. The tripping command is sent 16ms after the
former shows certain limitations - detection of a differential fault inception.
current does not provide a clear distinction between internal B. ANN application
faults and other conditions. Inrush magnetizing currents, The paper [10] presents a wide optimization process in-
stationary overexcitation of a core, external faults combined volving the type of an ANN as well as both pre- and post-
with saturation of the CTs and/or CTs and protected trans- processing algorithms for the power transformer protection.
former ratio mismatch are the most relevant phenomena
which may upset the current balance causing the relay to w1
M
maloperate. E
w2
A
A. Fuzzy Logic application S
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To enhance the performance of transformer protection a R
I Ruling-out the hypothesis of MIN
multi-criteria fuzzy logic based relaying frame may be used N stationary overexcitation
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external fault combined with
δ>∆
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Fuzzyfication Defuzzyfication T ∆
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Fig.3. Simplified block diagram of the fuzzy logic approach. Fig.4. Simplified block diagram of the considered fuzzy logic relay
for power transformers.
 Fig.5. Fuzzy Logic based relay operation under sample turn-to-turn fault occurring during energizing of the transformer.
With reference to Fig.6, a neural network relay (NNR)
consists of three basic units: a pre-processor, an ANN itself
and a post-processor. In the case of a power transformer, a
differential relay measures the currents on all the sides
through the Current Transformers (CTs) - and sometimes -
also the voltages through the Voltage Transformers (VTs).
These signals are pre-filtered using the analog anti-aliasing
filters and next sampled (in this paper 2nd order RC circuit
with cut-off at 350Hz; sampling at 1kHz). The differential
and restraining currents are next formed according to the art
of differential relaying for power transformers.
Three different levels of pre-processing have been de-
veloped and tested: - NNR without essential pre-processing;
- with separation of 12 criteria signals; and - with using of
settings obtained from comparison of the criteria signals
with their appropriate thresholds.
In the first case an ANN is fed just by samples of differ-
ential and restraining currents and operates as a protective
relay for power transformer. The length of the sliding data
window and the set of employed signals are the only pa-
rameters to be optimized in such an approach.
In the second approach a NNR may combine the advan-
tages of the ANN technology with the expert knowledge
having the form of relaying principles. The relaying criteria
(such as 2nd harmonic restraint) enable to convert the natu-
ral relaying signals into the space of features to be fed into
an ANN itself. In the paper, the feature universe consists of
8 criteria signals (per phase), achieved by applying 12 pro-
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97V
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Fig.6. The basic configuration of a Neural Network based Relay
(NNR) for power transformers
tection criteria (as in fuzzy logic approach).
In the criteria-based approach, the pre-processor converts
the natural relaying signals into 8 features. These signals, are
always real positive and either their low or high values indi-
cate on an internal fault. These criteria signals are next fed
into an ANN. Only the most recent samples are forwarded
(no sliding data window).
To analyze logic signals produced by comparison of an
appropriate settings, instead of using an output logic circuit,
an ANN based classifier is employed. Each criterion is apti-
mized individually prior to usage with the objective to
minimize the percentage of missing and false indications as
well as the provided average identification time [11]. No
sliding data window is applied - only the most recent sam-
ples are fed.
Two methods was analyzed for determination of the final
decision (post-processing) of the relay: natural post-
processing and filter application. Since only two classes of
disturbances are relevant in power system protection (inter-
nal faults and other conditions), ANNs operating as protec-
tive relays are usually trained to respond with two distinctive
values, respectively. Thus, to analyze the output from an
ANN only the thresholding is needed. Such kind of post-
processing was denoted as natural post-processing. Instead
of this also filters was used: mean-value filter (averaging of
the result) and median filter.
For all considered cases the feed-forward three-layer
fully interconnected sigmoidal ANNs was used. Two basic
configurations of a NNR of a three-phase power transformer
was tested: with single ANN for each transformer phase and
with ANN observing the three phases. The actual number of
training patterns presented to ANNs count in tens of thou-
sands - due to the three-phase structure of a protected trans-
former and the sliding data window of a NNR.
Wide comparative analysis with different NNR structure
has been provided. Majority of the developed NNRs handle
well the special testing cases [10].
V. APPLICATION TO CT AND CVT CORRECTION
Certain construction limitations of the instrument transform-
ers may in some cases cause maloperation or substantial de-
lay in tripping of the protective relays.
One of the method for correction of CTs saturation con-
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20 40 60 80 100 120 140
time, ms
primary and compensated secondary currents. Since the
Fig. 9. Results of CVT transients error compensation during
CT’s transfer function is nonlinear, usage of the nonlinear phault-to-ground fault at the substation
artificial multilayer neural network structure with some form
of feed-back (recurrent network), as presented in Fig.7, is Very generally, the dynamics of a CVT is determined by
required. The sigmoidal tangent activation function has been two factors:
assigned to neurons in hidden layers and the linear one to the • nonlinear oscillations under saturation of magnetic core
output neuron of the selected ANN architecture. of the CVT step-down transformer,
The sliding data widow consisting of the recent and a • discharging of the CVT internal energy during short cir-
few historical samples of the signals, is fed to the ANN. Re- cuits on an associated transmission line.
scaled samples of the CT current are putted on the input The greater influence has the second source of transient er-
register: iw ( n − N + 1) , ... iw (n ) . ANN output signal ror. Especially, faults at zero crossing of the primary volt-
ic ( n − N d ) represents corrected CT current. ages result in substantial transient errors that, in turn, affect
Result of compensation the secondary CT current is pre- the operation of supplied relays.
sented in Fig. 8. Secondary current waveform was obtained The idea of CVT transients error compensation pre-
from the EMTP simulation of 3-phase fault at the substation sented in [12] is based on finding of an inverse transfer
of 400 kV system [8]. It can be seen that the proposed ANN function of the CVT model and reproducing it with an ANN
corrector almost perfectly reproduces the primary current. - what is similar to the approach used for CT correction.
Current magnitude (Fig. 8b) is estimated according to the Therefore, the proposed ANN corrector has general structure
full-period Fourier method. as in Fig. 7.
Different ANN sizes and input/feedback connections
D
3ULPDU\ VHFRQGDU\ DQG FRPSHQVDWHG FXUUHQW have been tested and analyzed. As an example, Fig. 9 pres-
 ents result of CVT correction during phase-to-ground fault at

the 400 kV substation. The fault is applied when the primary
voltage of the faulted phase crossing zero.
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VHFRQGDU\ FXUUHQW VI. APPLICATION TO FAULT TYPE
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CLASSIFICATION
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$PSOLWXGH HVWLPDWLRQ Fast fault detection and classification of the fault type is
one of the most important task of the protection relays and

fault location function. The basic idea of the fault type esti-
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 mation consists in analysing of the phase and zero-sequence

,

voltages and currents. The ANNs have good pattern recog-


nition and classification feature and that is what is here ex-

      
pected.
WLPH PV
The proposed neural fault type estimator (NFTE) con-
Fig. 8. Plot of phase S currents generated from simulation of 3- sists of 4 neural networks: three recurrent nets for particular
phase fault at the substation (RF=0Ω). Compensation carried out by
phase fault detection and the fourth feedforward one for fault
ANN of 5-5-1 structure (a). Amplitude estimation of primary, sec-
ondary and compensated current (b). to ground recognition [13]. The NFTE uses feature vectors
formed by V (voltage) and I (current) trials. The architecture
 [2] Dalstein T., Kulicke B., Neural network approach to
_ XQ5 _
fault classification for high speed protective relaying.
_ XQ5−  _
IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, Vol.10, No.2,
< 7Q
April 1995, pp.1002-1009.
5
_X
Q −  1 3K +  _ [3] Sidhu T.S., Singh H., Sachdev M.S., Design, imple-
5
Y Sn mentation and testing of an artificial neural network
_L
Q _ based fault direction discriminator for protecting
5
_L
Q− _ $113K
Y Rn transmission lines. IEEE Transactions on Power De-
5 livery, Vol.11, No.2, April 1995, pp.697-703.
_L
Q −  1 3K +  _ [4] Sanaye-Pasand M., Malik O.P., Performance of a re-
67 current neural network-based power transmission line
,Q
fault directional module. Eng Int Syst (1997) 4, pp.
221-228.
[5] Warwick K., Ekwue A. And Aggarwal R. (ed). Artifi-
cial intelligence techniques in power systems. The In-
] 

 
stitution of Electrical Engineers, London, 1997.
,Q
67
= 6
PD[_ LQ _ 
6 7
 _ LQ −  _  _ LQ _ 
7
 _ LQ −  _  [6] Saha M.M, Kasztenny B., Application of fuzzy logic in
Fig. 10. Recurrent Neural Fault Estimator for a faulty phase power system protection, International Conference
selection 'Modern Trends in the Protection Schemes of Electric
Power Apparatus and Systems', 28-30 October 1998,
of the NFTE for a faulty phase selection is sketched in New Delhi, paper IX-1.
Fig.10. The ANNs are free layer networks with activation [7] Bachmann B., Novosel D., Hart D., Hu Y., Saha M.
functions of both hidden layers of hyperbolic tangent type M., Application of artificial neural networks for series
and linear functions in output neurons. compensated line protection, Proc. of the Int. Conf. on
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nets ANN-Ph - Fig.10) and eventually fault to ground lando, January 28 - February 2, 1996, pp.68-73.
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of outputs of particular ANN-Ph classifiers from -1 to 1 in- based dynamic compensation of current transformer
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VII. CONCLUSIONS of the 32nd Universities Power Engineering Confer-
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The paper reviews the AI approaches to power system
708-712.
protection and focuses on the application of ANN and fuzzy
[11] Kasztenny B., Rosolowski E., Saha M. and Hillstrom
logic techniques.
B., A self-organizing fuzzy logic based protective relay
A number of novel application and concepts have been
- an application to power transformer protection, IEEE
presented including fuzzy logic approach to differential
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transformer protection and ANN application to the trans-
1997, pp.1119-27.
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