IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 36, NO.

5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2000 1235

Time Coordination Method for Power System

Protection by Evolutionary Algorithm
C. W. So and K. K. Li

Abstract—A typical industrial power network may consist of

hundreds of pieces of equipment and even more protection relays
to protect the system are required. Each protection relay in the
power network needs to be coordinated with the relays protecting
the adjacent equipment. The overall protection coordination is,
thus, very complicated. A new concept of protection coordination
by time is introduced in this paper to formulate all the system relays
and system equipment operation into a set of optimization equa-
tions and constraints. Its purpose is to search for an optimal pro-
tection setting to minimize the system disturbance time as well as
the time of interruption of the power supply. An evolutionary al-
gorithm is applied as a constraint satisfaction optimization tool to
search for the optimal relay setting. This method can find the best
protection relay coordination, which cannot be achieved by tra-
ditional methods. This is the most significant achievement of the
paper. Fig. 1. Duplication of protection schemes.

Index Terms—Evolutionary algorithm, power system protection,

protection coordination. [1]–[5]. This paper presents how a sophisticated optimization
technique is applied to adjust the relay settings of overcurrent
and distance relays, and examines the satisfaction of the relay
I. INTRODUCTION operation times within the coordination margin by considering

A TYPICAL industrial power network may consist of hun-

dreds of pieces of equipment, and even more protection
relays to protect the system are required. The protection system
the effect on all protection systems.

II. PROBLEM FORMULATION

consists of various relays with different operating principles to
A typical protection scheme is shown in Fig. 1. Very often, two
tackle different types of faults. Very often, two or more relays
or more relays are required at various ends to sense and exchange
with different operating principles depending on the voltage
system information in order to provide a high fault clearing time
level and importance may be required to protect the equipment.
so as to increase the reliability of the protection system.
Each protection relay in the power system needs to be coordi-
To clear a fault, the faulty equipment will be tripped by either
nated with the relays protecting the adjacent equipment. The
relay which detects the fault more quickly and sends an open-
overall protection coordination is, thus, very complicated. Un-
circuit command faster. The operation time of the equipment
fortunately, in a practical industrial power network, it is almost
may be expressed as
impossible to obtain a protection setting that can satisfy the co-
ordination between all adjacent relays. In fact, there exists a cer- (1)
tain number of blind spots of coordination in the protection of
the power system. where is the operation time of the protection scheme pro-
In the traditional method of protection coordination, protec- tecting the equipment, and is the minimum fault clearing
tion relays are classified according to their type, such as overcur- time of the protection scheme ( ) and is equal to the sum of
rent and distance protection, and coordination is carried out on the minimum possible time of the protective relays plus the oper-
each type individually. The effect of coordination on other pro- ating time of the fault-clearing device (breaker operation time).
tection systems is not usually considered. Work done on relay If the faulty equipment cannot be isolated, the backup protec-
setting coordination on individual types of relays is shown in tion located in the adjacent equipment will take up the responsi-
bility of the system recovery as soon as possible. The sequence
Paper ICPSD 99–49, presented at the 1999 Industry Applications Society An- of backup protection tripping actions will be carried out stage
nual Meeting, Phoenix, AZ, October 3–7, and approved for publication in the by stage until the system disturbance is cleared. Fig. 2 shows
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS by the Power Systems Pro- the backup stages for clearing the system disturbance.
tection Committee of the IEEE Industry Applications Society. Manuscript sub-
mitted for review Ocotber 8, 1999 and released for publication March 17, 2000. When the fault clearance by the main protection has failed,
This work was supported by Hong Kong Polytechnic University. the first stage backup protection will be initiated. If one ele-
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Hong Kong ment of the first stage backup protection fails, the second stage
Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong (e-mail: [email protected];
[email protected]). backup protection will be started. A time delay exists between
Publisher Item Identifier S 0093-9994(00)07617-9. the main protection and the first stage backup, and between the
0093–9994/00$10.00 © 2000 IEEE
1236 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 36, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2000

TABLE I
RELAY SETTING METHODS

In the coordination of backup protection, the fastest relay op-

Fig. 2. Backup protection for the faulty equipment, assuming first-stage erated will decide the equipment isolation time. The two adja-
backup protection failure. cent pieces of equipment are formed into a coordination pair.
They are protected by the backup relays and will be operated
in sequence. The operation time difference between the coor-
first and second stage backup protection. The formation of the
dination pair must conform to the grading margin. The number
first and second stage obviously depends on the fault location.
of system constraints should be the product of the number of
Ordinary protection system has no communication on informa-
combination of coordination pairs, the number of combinations
tion exchange for the location of fault occurrence and the stage
of busbar faults, the number of possible system configurations,
of each relay. Therefore, the relay setting is the only parameter
and the variation of fault types. For the purpose of demonstra-
to control the tripping in the desirable sequence. A new method
tion, a single-phase-to-ground fault is considered in this paper.
of coordination method called “time coordination” is developed
The effectiveness of the relay setting is evaluated by the ob-
in this paper to formulate all the system relays and system equip-
jective value as defined in (2). A smaller objective value indi-
ment operation into a set of optimization equations and con-
cates a good coordinated protection system
straints. Its purpose is to search for an optimal protection setting
to minimize the system disturbance time as well as the time of objective (2)
interruption of customer supply.
where is the relay operation time including the breaker op-
III. COORDINATION OF BACKUP PROTECTION erating time at that particular system configuration . is
the difference in the coordination margin between the coordi-
In this paper, the following backup protections are consid-
nation pair of equipment and the preferred value of coordina-
ered:
tion margin. In the case of distance relays, it is the difference
• definite time-delay overcurrent (TDOC); of the computed zone coverage and the corresponding preferred
• Inverse definite multiple time lag overcurrent (IDMTL); coverage of the protected line. is the number of constraint
• directional inverse definite multiple time lag overcurrent violations among all the coordination pairs for equipment .
(DIDMTL); , , , and are coefficients governing the amount of contri-
• distance protection zone 2 (DIST2); bution to the overall objective value. relates to the relay oper-
• distance protection zone 3 (DIST3). ation time; relates to the deviation from the preferred setting;
The relay setting methods and operating conditions are sum- and and relates to the number of constraint violations. The
marized in Table I where range of constants ranges from 0 to 1 and is set according to the
I system current flow at the relaying point; user preference. For instance, the effect of relay operation time
Zf measured impedance at the relaying point; is reduced to zero if is set to zero. If, is set close to 1, the
Tdelay delay time setting; computed relay setting will attempt to align the preferred set-
Isetting is the current setting; ting as close as possible. In some system configurations, for ex-
TM time multiplier; ample, a system with a weak source, too much emphasis should
CSM current setting multiplier; not be placed on the minimization of the constraint violations,
CT current transformer at the relaying point; therefore, should be set closer to 0. The speed of minimiza-
TZONE2 time delay for distance zone 2; tion of constraint violation is controlled by . The number of
TZONE3 time delay for distance zone 3; constraint violations for some complicated systems may be up
Z2REACH reach for distance zone 2 fault; to 10 000, and is used to moderate the dominate effect of con-
Z3REACH reach for distance zone 3 fault; straint violation to the objective functions and is typically set to
where is the per-unit 0.1. Typical values of , , and used in this paper are 0.9, 0.8,
current; and are two constants. and 0.6, respectively.
SO AND LI: POWER SYSTEM PROTECTION BY EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM 1237

Fig. 4. Simplified industrial network.

duce the next generation. Several sets of relay settings are al-
tered by a process called “mutation” to produce several sets of
new relay settings as the next generation. The mutation is based
on Gaussian normal distribution noise as shown in

Fig. 3. Time coordination algorithm flow chart. (3)

where
Note: In each system configuration, each coordination pair of element of relay settings;
equipment will be iterated by , , scale factor for EA mutation;
offset for EA mutation;
IV. TIME COORDINATION ALGORITHM effectiveness of the relay settings which can be
The key steps of the time coordination algorithm are shown reflected in its objective value;
in Fig. 3. The time coordination is classified as constraint satis- Gaussian normal distribution noise.
faction optimization and each stage of the coordination process The scale factor and the offset are to control the perfor-
is discussed in the following. mance of the EA and are typically set to 1 and 0, respectively.
These newly generated relay settings should be passed to con-
A. Initialize Relay Settings straints checking and objective calculation for the next EA gen-
eration.
Several sets of relay settings will be randomly generated.
Each set of relay settings will be checked against all system con- C. Constraint Checking
straints and configurations. The effectiveness of the relay set-
tings is calculated by (2). Any violation of system constraints In (2), is the number of constraint violations. Each relay
will be penalized and this will be reflected in the increased ob- settings will be checked under different coordination pairs. If
jective value. the time difference of the coordination pair is less than the co-
ordination time margin, will be incremented by one. More
B. Evolutionary Algorithm constraint violations of relay settings will result in a larger ob-
jective value and will lead to less chance of surviving in the next
The evolutionary algorithm (EA) is a stochastic parallel
generation. In the constraint checking, the relay operation time
search method for multivariables. It can find out the optimum
and coordination margin also be calculated. The ob-
relay settings in a fixed number of generations with maximum
jective value can be calculated for the next generation.
satisfaction of coordination constraints. The industrial power
network under study is very complex. It contains a large D. Termination
amount of variables and numerous constraints. The optimal
The process will stop after a fixed number of generations. The
relay settings may be considered as the global optimum point
number of generations required to carry out the optimum relay
on the solution searching space. Conventional searching
setting depends on the pattern and the number of initial relay
methods, such as steeper-decant and nonlinear programming
settings.
[1]–[3], perform a single-point search. In most cases, the global
optimum probably will not be reached just for one trial due to
V. SIMULATION
being trapped by the local optimums.
EA employs a multipoint search methodology. The chances The simplified industrial network for this study is shown in
of reaching the global optimum are, therefore, much higher. Fig. 4. The system parameters are listed in Tables II and III. For
It is based on the modified evolutionary programming tech- the demonstration of the significance of the time-grading algo-
nique [6]–[9] by applying mutations of relay settings to pro- rithm, all transmission lines at both ends are protected by inverse
1238 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 36, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2000

TABLE II TABLE IV
GENERATOR PARAMETERS RELAY SETTING RULES (DIST 1 IS THE ZONE 1 SETTING OF DISTANCE RELAY

TABLE III
TRANSMISSION LINE PARAMETERS

Fig. 5. Sample network.

definite time phase fault overcurrent (IDMTL OC), inverse def-

inite time earth fault overcurrent (IDMTL EF), earth fault dis-
tance zone 2 (DIST 2), and earth distance zone 3 (DIST 3). The
EA method used in this paper is applied to the relays associ-
ated with the transmission lines connecting the various buses as
shown in Fig. 4. This is adequate to demonstrate the application
of EA method to relay coordination. The relays associated with
generators G1–G4 are not considered in this case study. If re- Fig. 6. Relay setting optimization direction.
quired, they can be included in the optimization process without
any problem. VI. COORDINATION IMPROVEMENT
The setting ranges of the type of relays are as follows:
Consider the simple network shown in Fig. 5. The backup
• IDMTL OC— CSM from 50% 200% in step of 1%, time protection from Bus A to Bus B is used as an example. The re-
multiplier (TM) from 0.1 1.0 in step of 0.01; laying point at Bus A has IDMTL and distance zone 2 and 3
• IDMTL EF—CSM from 20% 80% in step of 1%, TM (DIST 2 and DIST 3). According to the EA statistical data, the
from 0.1 1.0 in step of 0.01; relay settings of IDMTL, DIST B, and DIST 3 are improving in
• DIST 2—reaching from 100% 999% in step of 1%, time each generation in the directions shown in Fig. 6, so as to op-
delay from 400 ms 1000 ms in step of 1 ms; timize the grading discrimination and coverage. Its major con-
• DIST 3—reaching from 100% 1999% in step of 1%, straint is the setting of relays at Bus B as shown in Fig. 7.
time delay from 400 ms 2000 ms in step of 1 ms. The time coordination method will keep the grading margin
The EA stochastically changes the relay setting in order to between relays at Bus A relative to relays at other buses at a
minimize the objective value. As the settings are generated in minimum. One example is the grading margin GM1 from DIST
random, some unwanted relay settings may be generated, re- 2 at Bus A to DIST 1 at Bus B, and GM2 from DIST 3 at Bus A
sulting in wasting of computation. To minimize this waste, rules to DIST 2 at Bus B. For the fault occurring far away from Bus
are established to control the value of the relay settings. Certain A, the operation time of IDMTL at Bus A should also be graded
types of relays will impose a desirable pattern. For example, with IDMTL at Bus B, for example, GM3. In fact, the relay
zone 2 reach of distance relays are normally equal to 150% of setting will be checked against all single-phase busbar faults in
zone 1 reach, and zone 3 reach is equal to 200% of zone 1 reach. all combinations of transmission line and generator outages. The
In the study, as time coordination methods can find out the op- relays at Bus A are, therefore, constrained by other adjacent bus
timum reach in zone 2 reach and zone 3 reach, the rule set in the relays according to the fault current direction.
simulation is that zone 1 reach must be less than zone 2 reach The zone 2 and zone 3 reach of distance relays are normally
and zone 2 reach must be less than zone 3 reach. The rules em- set as the effective impedance from Bus A to Bus B plus a cer-
ployed in the simulation are listed in Table IV. tain percentage of the next shortest line impedance. A typical
SO AND LI: POWER SYSTEM PROTECTION BY EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM 1239

TABLE V
BEST RELAY SETTINGS AMONG 200 INITIALIZED RELAY SETTINGS

Fig. 7. Overall characteristic of relays at Bus A and Bus B relays.

Fig. 8. Distance zone 2 and zone 3 reach for radial-fed circuits.

TABLE VI
OPTIMUM RELAY SETTINGS

Fig. 9. Distance zone 2 and zone 3 reach for ring-fed circuits.

example is shown in Fig. 8. The reach of DIST 2 at Bus A is

assumed equal to the protected line impedance plus 30% of the
next shortest line impedance, i.e., . The reach of
DIST 3 is also assumed equal to the protected line impedance
plus 80% of the next shortest line impedance, i.e., .
If Bus C is interconnected to Bus D by a line, as shown in
Fig. 9, the reach of DIST 2 will be
, and the reach of DIST 3 will be
. The reach of DIST 2 and DIST 3
is, therefore, dependent on the protected line impedance . For VII. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
a long transmission line, the impedance will be larger and the
effectiveness of the ring circuit will be reduced. The percentage Relay coordination is carried out using the EA with the
of zone 2 and zone 3 reach will, therefore, be smaller. For the process previously described. Table V shows the best set of
system under study, all transmission lines are interconnected initial relay settings from 200 sets of initialized relay settings.
and the effects of interconnections are considered for zone 2 Table VI shows the optimized relay settings by using the EA
and zone 3 reach of distance relays. after 2000 generations. The performance of these relay settings
1240 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 36, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2000

TABLE VII [2] A. J. Urdaneta, H. Restrepo, S. Marquez, and J. Sanchez, “Coordination

PERFORMANCE OF RELAY SETTING COMPARISON of directional overcurrent relay timing using linear programming,” IEEE
Trans. Power Delivery, vol. 11, pp. 122–129, Jan. 1996.
[3] S. J. Lee and C. C. Liu, “Intelligent approach to coordination identifica-
tion in distance relaying,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Intelligent Systems Appli-
cations to Power Systems, Orlando, FL, Jan. 28–Feb. 2, 1996, pp. 62–67.
[4] C. W. So, K. K. Li, K. T. Lai, and K. Y. Fung, “Application of ge-
netic algorithm for overcurrent relay coordination,” in Proc. IEE 6th
Int. Conf. Developments in Power System Protection, Nottingham, U.K.,
Mar. 1997, pp. 66–69.
[5] I. Dabbaghchi, R. D. Christie, G. W. Rosenwald, and C. C. Liu, “AI
application areas in power systems,” IEEE Expert, vol. 12, pp. 58–66,
Jan./Feb. 1997.
is indicated by the sum of relay operating time, the count of [6] D. E. Goldberg, “Genetic algorithm approach: Why, how, and what
next?,” in Proc. Conf. Adaptive and Learning System: Theory and
constraint violations, and the objective value. After the compu- Applications, New Haven, CT, May 1985, pp. 247–253.
tation, the objective value is significantly improved. It means [7] , Genetic Algorithm in Search, Optimization and Machine
that all relays have optimum operation for all single-phase Learning. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989.
[8] D. B. Fogel, “An analysis of evolutionary programming,” in Proc. 1st
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minimum. La Jolla, CA, 1992, pp. 43–51.
Constraint violations always occur in low-fault-level condi- [9] J. H. Kim and H. Myung, “Evolutionary programming techniques for
constrained optimization problems,” IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput., vol. 1,
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some marginal IDMTL operations cannot coordinate with adja-
cent IDMTL or distance relays, and this will result in failure
in constraint checking. The time coordination algorithm can re-
duce the number of constraint failures significantly. The per-
C. W. So (M’96) was born in Hong Kong in 1969.
formance of relays before and after the setting computation is He received the B.Eng. degree in 1996 from Hong
shown in Table VII. Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, where he
is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree.
He is currently an Engineer II with CLP Power
VIII. CONCLUSION Ltd., Hong Kong, where he is responsible for pro-
tection and substation automation. His research inter-
The time coordination method has successfully been applied ests are power system protection, applications of arti-
to coordinate the backup relay settings, disregarding the opera- ficial intelligence, substation automation, and power
tion principles. For numerous noncontinuous variables, such as system computer programming.
backup relay settings for an industrial power network, the EA
effectively optimizes the relay grading margins and minimizes
the coordination constraint violations. The relay settings are op-
timized and directed toward the desirable pattern. The time co- K. K. Li (M’76–SM’91) received the M.Sc. degree
ordination method is the milestone of an automatic protection from the University of Manchester Institute of
setting coordination calculation. Science and Technology, Manchester, U.K., and the
Ph.D degree from City University, London, U.K.
He has worked as a Protection Engineer in Hong
REFERENCES Kong. He is currently an Associate Professor in the
[1] B. Chattopadhyay, M. S. Sachdev, and T. S. Sidhu, “An on-line relay Department of Electrical Engineering, Hong Kong
coordination algorithm for adaptive protection using linear program- Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. His research in-
ming technique,” IEEE Trans. Power Delivery, vol. 11, pp. 165–171, terests are power system protection and applications
Jan. 1996. of artificial intelligence in power systems.