OPTIMIZATION OF LOCATION OF PROTECTIVE DEVICES IN A POWER NETWORK

Abstract

The problem of determining the optimal locations of protective devices on an electrical tree network with subtree dependency is investigated. The aim is to reduce the amount of inconvenience caused to customers that are affected by any given fault on the network. An appropriate implementation of tabu search is proposed and compared against a method currently used by the electrical supply companies i.e. kVA.km Method. Computational tests are performed on randomly generated electrical tree networks varying in size and branch complexity. Both the proposed methods outperformed the one used in practice. In particular the tabu search implementation is found to produce the best results without taking an excessive amount of computational time. Moreover, on the occurrence of any fault on the electrical network there should be proper setting & coordination between the relays. So, for that purpose a .method has been discussed for the optimal relay setting.