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Various fault location methods have been developed in the past to identify the faulty phase, fault type, faulty section, and distance. However, this identification is commonly conducted in a separate manner. An effective fault location should be able to identify all of these at the same time. Therefore, in this work, a method using a support vector machine (SVM) to identify the fault type, faulty section, and distance considering the faulty phase is proposed. The proposed method uses voltage sag magnitude of the distribution system as the main feature for the SVM to identify faults. The fault type is classified using a directed acyclic graph SVM. The possible faulty sections are identified by estimating the fault resistance using support vector regression and matching the voltage sag data in the database with the actual voltage sag data. The most possible faulty sections are ranked using ranking analysis. The fault distance for the possible faulty sections is then identified using support vector regression analysis and its overfitting or underfitting issues are addressed by the proper selection of a regularization parameter. The feasibility of the proposed method was tested on an actual Malaysian distribution system. The results of faulty phase, fault type, faulty section, and fault distance are analyzed. The performance of the proposed method is compared with various other intelligent methods such as the artificial neural network, deep neural network, extreme learning machine, and kriging method. The test results indicate that the faulty phase and fault type yield 100 % accurate results. All the faulty sections are identified and the proposed method obtains reliable fault location.

This paper presents a load shedding scheme (LSS) based on system frequency and voltage stability (VS). In the proposed scheme, the amount of power imbalance is determined using a rate of change of frequency, and the load shedding priority is carried out based on a VS index. The load with the highest tendency for voltage collapse (based on the index value) is given first priority to be shed. Thus, by shedding the most sensitive load, the distribution system can be saved from power collapse and then the system can return to its nominal state after load shedding. The proposed LSS is validated through simulation using PSCAD/EMTDC software on a Malaysian distribution network that consists of two mini-hydro generators. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme manages to shed the optimal amount of load when compared to conventional and adaptive frequency LSS. Moreover, apart from frequency stability, the proposed scheme also shows a significant improvement in the voltage profile of the islanded system.

This paper compares the performance of three population-based algorithms including particle swarm optimization (PSO), evolutionary programming (EP), and genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the multi-objective optimal power flow (OPF) problem. The unattractive characteristics of the cost-based OPF including loss, voltage profile, and emission justifies the necessity of multi-objective OPF study. This study presents the programming results of the nine essential single-objective and multi-objective functions of OPF problem. The considered objective functions include cost, active power loss, voltage stability index, and emission. The multi-objective optimizations include cost and active power loss, cost and voltage stability index, active power loss and voltage stability index, cost and emission, and finally cost, active power loss, and voltage stability index. To solve the multi-objective OPF problem, Pareto optimal method is used to form the Pareto optimal set. A fuzzy decision-based mechanism is applied to select the best comprised solution. In this work, to decrease the running time of load flow calculation, a new approach including combined Newton-Raphson and Fast-Decouple is conducted. The proposed methods are tested on IEEE 30-bus test system and the best method for each objective is determined based on the total cost and the convergence values of the considered objectives. The programming results indicate that based on the inter-related nature of the objective functions, a control system cannot be recommended based on individual optimizations and the secondary criteria should also be considered. Refereed/Peer-reviewed