Smart Fault Location for Smart Grids

Fault location is an important application among intelligent monitoring and outage management tasks used for realization of self healing networks, one of the most attractive features of smart grids. The data gathered from various intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) installed throughout the power system could be utilized for smart approaches to locating faults in both transmission and distribution systems. This paper discusses issues associated with improving accuracy of fault location methods in smart grids using an abundance of IED data. Two examples of how the gathered data from different IEDs is used to improve fault location accuracy in transmission and distribution systems are discussed in detail.