Thomas Bopp

Protection security assessment using automated analysis

Protection security assessment of power grids becomes an important task in the course of a competitive energy business and distributed power generation based on renewable resources. The analysis of past blackouts studied by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) shows that protection relays are involved in about 75% of all major disturbances. One reason for that is the non adequate adaption of the protection systems to the changing network conditions. In particular the relay hidden failures causes relay malfunctions and unintended supply interruptions in the past.

Protection security assessment - System evaluation based on fuzzification of protection settings

This paper presents a new method for an automated weak spot detection of the protection system of electrical energy systems. The intent was to find a fast and holistic approach. To fulfill the holistic requirement the settings of all relays should be analyzed in detail. A fuzzy system was developed therefore. The use of a fuzzy system enables the possibility of integration in an automated application. To prove the benefit a comparison has been done between the fuzzy system and the commonly proofed method finger-print analysis. This paper demonstrates the capability of the presented fuzzy system to detect weak spots globally, to identify the reasons in detail and to calculate the result very fast.

EPSO DE algorithm for system-wide protection coordination

This paper presents a fully automated methodology for the coordination of the protection system of a system-wide power network. The introduced metaheuristic is capable of handling different protection schemes and complex network structures. A metaheuristic consists of three basic elements: mathematical representation of the problem, a fitness function and the optimization algorithm. A new variant of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is presented to solve this challenge as well as possible. This paper makes use of previously published works and focuses on the optimization algorithm. Nevertheless the method was applied to a real transmission network. The results are discussed and rated and the effectiveness is pinpointed.