IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO.
2, APRIL 2005
Fuzzy-Logic-Based Fault Classification
Scheme for Digital Distance Protection
Biswarup Das, Member, IEEE, and J. Vittal Reddy
Abstract—In this paper, a fuzzy-logic-based algorithm to identify
the type of faults for digital distance protection system has been
developed. The proposed technique is able to accurately identify
the phase(s) involved in all ten types of shunt faults that may occur
in a transmission line under different fault resistances, inception
angle, and loading levels. The proposed method needs only three
line-current measurements available at the relay location and can
perform the fault classification task in about a half-cycle period.
Thus, the proposed technique is well suited for implementation in
a digital distance protection scheme.
Index Terms—Fault classification, fuzzy logic, power transmis-
sion.
I. INTRODUCTION
A CCURATE, fast, and reliable fault classification technique
is an important operational requirement in modern day
power transmission systems. On one hand, correct information
of the type of fault is readily needed for fault location algorithms
[1]. On the other hand, in digital distance protection schemes,
for proper operation of the protective relays, correct determina-
tion of the fault type is a prerequisite [2].
Because of the above-mentioned requirements, a significant
amount of research work has been directed to address the
problem of an accurate fault classification scheme. Among
the various techniques reported for fault classification in
transmission system, the most widely used techniques are: i)
artificial-neural-network (ANN)-based approach [3]–[9], ii)
expert system-based approach [10]–[12], and iii) fuzzy and
fuzzy neural-network-based approach [13], [14]. Although the
neural-network-based approaches have been quite successful
in determining the correct fault type, the main disadvantage of
ANN is that it requires a considerable amount of training effort
for good performance, especially under a wide variation of
operating conditions (such as system loading level, fault resis-
tance, fault inception instance, etc.). Similarly, the effectiveness
of the expert system-based technique also depends largely on
the domain knowledge of the experts, which is often quite time
consuming to obtain. To avoid the above problems, a simple
fuzzy logic-based approach has been proposed for the fault
classification problem [13]. However, in [13], only the nature
of the fault (whether LG or LLG), along with the confidence
factor has been identified, but the phases involved in the fault
have not been explicitly determined. Thus, this method tries
Manuscript received Ocotber 22, 2003; revised January 23, 2004. Paper no.
TPWRD-00527-2003.
B. Das is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of
Technology, Roorkee 247 667, India.
J. V. Reddy is with Tata Consultancy Services, New Delhi 110 001, India.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2004.834294
0885-8977/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE
609
to determine only the asymmetrical faults involving ground.
Also, no LL fault has been considered in this work. To improve
upon this, a fuzzy–neural approach has been suggested in [14].
In this method, only the nature of the fault (i.e., whether 1LG,
LL, LLG, or symmetrical) has been determined. Thus, this
method can be considered as an improved version of [13].
However, this method also requires extensive training of the
ANN. Recently, a fault classification technique suitable for a
fault recorder has been proposed in [15], which can identify all
ten types of short-circuit faults. However, neither the numerical
method used in nor the time taken by the proposed technique
for fault identification has been discussed in the paper.
To address the above limitations, in this paper, a fuzzy-logic-
based fault classification scheme is proposed. As this proposed
technique is not based on ANN or expert system, there is no
need for computationally expensive training of ANN or expert
domain knowledge in this method. The proposed scheme can
be considered as an improvement over the existing fuzzy-logic-
based methods [13], [14] in the sense that it determines accu-
rately all ten types of possible short-circuit faults (e.g., a-g, b-g,
c-g, a-b, b-c, c-a, a-b-g, b-c-g, c-a-g, a-b-c/a-b-c-g). Moreover,
it has already been explained in [13] that it is very difficult to
determine the fault type by the traditional (i.e., deterministic)
techniques. Hence, because of its capability of determining ac-
curately all the ten types of short-circuit faults easily, the pro-
posed method can also be considered as an improvement over
the traditional techniques. As will be shown later in this paper,
this method is capable of determining the fault type quite accu-
rately under wide variations of operating conditions (i.e., pre-
fault power level, fault resistance, fault inception angle, etc.) in
about half-a-cycle period of fundamental frequency and, hence,
is quite suitable for integration in digital distance protection
schemes.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, the fault
identification strategy is described in detail. In Section III, the
robustness of the proposed method under a wide variation of
operating conditions is established with appropriate numerical
results. Lastly, Section IV discusses the main conclusions of this
work.
II. FAULT CLASSIFICATION STRATEGY
A. Basic Considerations
The fault classification algorithm is based on the angular dif-
ferences among the sequence components of the fundamental
during fault current as well as on their relative magnitudes. As
an example, for a phase-a-to-ground bolted fault in an unloaded
system, the phasor diagram of sequence components of fault
610 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005

TABLE I TABLE II
FUNDAMENTAL RELATIONS FOR ASYMMETRICAL FAULTS TYPICAL VALUES OF THE DIFFERENT VARIABLES

the columns for the angles , and corre-

sponding to the symmetrical fault case are left blank. Now it
is to be noted that the relationships given in Table I are valid
only for solid faults in an unloaded system. Depending upon
the present prefault power level, fault resistance, fault location,
fault inception angle, etc., the values of these five quantities
(i.e., ) are going to deviate
from their corresponding ideal values (as given in Table I).
As an example, the values of these five quantities are shown
Fig. 1. Phasor diagram for a-g fault. in Table II for different faults occurring at the middle of the
transmission line of the sample two-area power system shown
in Fig. 2. The duration of the faults has been assumed to be
currents is shown in Fig. 1. In this figure, the zero–, positive-, five cycles. The data for this two-area system are given in the
and negative-sequence components of the postfault currents rel- Appendix. For the results given in Table II, the system and
ative to phase “a” are denoted as , and , respec- fault conditions have been assumed as: prefault power angle
tively. Similarly, the sequence components for phases “b” and , fault resistance ohm, and fault inception
“c” are denoted as , and , respec- angle . It is to be noted that the FIA has been
tively. In Fig. 1, the symbol “a” stands for the complex operator defined from the positive going zero crossing instant of the
. phase-a voltage.
From Fig. 1, the angles between the positive- and negative- To find out the ranges of variations of these five variables with
sequence components of phase a, b, and c are given by [15] and the variation of the operating conditions, a large number of fault
[16] studies have been carried out under different combinations of
fault location and FIA and the values of these five quan-
tities have been computed for each of these faults. From these
data, the mean values of each of these five quantities have been
(1) calculated for each specific type of fault and subsequently, these
mean values have been rounded to their nearest whole number.
Also, for this type of fault (i.e., a-g fault), the magnitudes of As an example, the mean value of the variable ‘ ’ had
, and are related by [16] been found to be 29.865 , which has been rounded to its nearest
whole number (i.e., 30 ). A similar exercise has been carried out
and (2) for the other variables also. Now, for subsequent reference, these
rounded, nearest whole numbers would be termed as “approxi-
Similar relationships as in (1) and (2) can also be written for mate mean value.” These mean values are given in Table III.
other type of asymmetrical faults (i.e., b-g, c-g, a-b, b-c, c-a,
a-b-g, b-c-g, and c-a-g) and these relations are given in Table I. B. Motivation and Development of Fuzzy Fault
In Table I, where Classification Scheme
, and , and are the nega- As Table III gives the inter-relationship between the fault type
tive-sequence impedance of the line, zero-sequence impedance and the five inputs, it is possible to formulate simple logic base
of the line, and fault impedance, respectively. Now, for sym- for determining the fault type from the values of these five in-
metrical faults, the zero- and negative-sequence currents do puts. However, because of the approximations involved, the dif-
not exist in the system. Hence, the angles , and ferent inputs (i.e., approximately 30 , approximately 90 , etc.)
are not defined for this case. Moreover, as the values of can be represented by appropriate, corresponding fuzzy vari-
the zero- and negative-sequence currents are zero, the values able. With these fuzzy variables, the following fuzzy rule base
of the factors and are also zero. Hence, in Table I, can be developed for identifying the fault type.
DAS AND REDDY: FUZZY-LOGIC-BASED FAULT CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR DIGITAL DISTANCE PROTECTION 611

Fig. 2. Study system.

TABLE III TABLE IV

APPROXIMATE MEAN VALUES OF THE DIFFERENT QUANTITIES FUZZY VARIABLES IN THE ANTECEDENT PARTS

Now, the values given in Table III have been calculated

using a full-cycle DFT (FCDFT) algorithm [17]. When these
values have been recalculated using half-cycle DFT algorithm
(HCDFT) [17], it was found that the values of are a little
different from the values obtained with FCDFT (the values
of other four quantities, that is, , and
remain more or less the same). As HCDFT is faster than
FCDFT, in this work, the HCDFT technique has been used.
As a result, in this work, the different fuzzy variables in the
Fig. 3. Triangular fuzzy membership function. antecedent parts of the fuzzy rules have been chosen as listed
in Table IV. To determine the appropriate triplets for repre-
1) Fuzzy Rule Base for Fault Type Identification: senting the fuzzy variables in the consequent parts of the rule
a) If is “approximately 30 ” and is “approxi- base (i.e., a-g, b-g, c-g, a-b, b-c, c-a, a-b-g, b-c-g, c-a-g), the
mately 150 ” and is “approximately 90 ” and following methodology has been adopted. Initially, in order to
is “high” and is “high” then fault type is ‘a-g’. represent the fault type correctly, a binary coding system has
d) If is “‘approximately 30 ” and is “approx- been developed. In this coding system, a 4-b binary number
imately 90 ” and is “approximately 150 ” and is used to represent the type of fault. The bit
is “low” and is “high,” then the fault type is represents the ground, the bit represents the phase “c,”
“a-b.” the bit represents the phase “b,” and the bit represents
g) If is “approximately 30 ” and is “approxi- the phase “a.” Thus, for a line-to-ground (a-g) fault, the 4-b
mately 90 ” and is “approximately 150 ” and number would be 1-0-0-1. Similarly, for a line-to-line (b-c)
is “high” and is “high,” then fault type is “a-b-g.” fault, the corresponding 4-b number would be 0-1-1-0. Sim-
j) If is “low” and is “low,” then the fault type is ilarly, this 4-b binary number also represents the other types
symmetrical. of fault. The complete chart of the binary numbers for rep-
Now, in all of the above fuzzy rules, as the variables in the an- resenting all possible types of faults is given in Table V. The
tecedent parts are actually all fuzzy variables, the variables in the corresponding, equivalent decimal numbers for each type of
consequent parts also should be represented by fuzzy variables. fault is also shown in Table V.
To represent all of these fuzzy variables (in both antecedent and Now, for all types of faults, the triplets have been chosen in
consequent parts of the fuzzy rules), in this work, the triangular such a way that the triangular function corresponding to any
membership function has been used. A general triangular mem- particular type of fault is symmetric about the equivalent dec-
bership function is shown in Fig. 3. The function can be com- imal number given in Table V for that particular type of fault.
pletely defined with reference to the points A, B, and C shown Thus, with reference to Table V, the different triplets, which have
in Fig. 3. It is to be noted that the points A and C have a member- been chosen for representing the fuzzy fault types, are shown in
ship value of 0.0 while the point B has a membership value of Table VI.
1.0. For further reference, these three points would henceforth Now, to utilize the fuzzy rule base described above for fault
be represented as the triplet (A, B, C). Hence, any fuzzy variable classification, the following standard fuzzy logic scheme (FLS)
can be easily defined and represented by this triplet (A, B, C). as shown in Fig. 4 has been used in this work.
612
Fig. 4. FLS for fault classification.
TABLE V
FAULT CODE TABLE
TABLE VI
FUZZY VARIABLES TO REPRESENT FAULT TYPE
In Fig. 4, the input quantities are presented at point P. These
quantities are , which are calcu-
lated from the sampled values of the during fault currents of
phases a, b, and c. The numerical algorithm for computing these
quantities is described in detail in [17]. As these quantities are
crisp in nature, they need to be first converted to their corre-
sponding fuzzy variables (as described in Table IV) by fuzzifi-
cation technique before application to the fuzzy inference en-
gine. In this work, the singleton fuzzifier [18] has been used for
the fuzzification task.
After fuzzification, the fuzzified inputs (available at point Q
in Fig. 4) are given to the fuzzy inference engine, which, fol-
lowing the given fuzzy rule base, gives the type of fault at its
output. For implementing the fuzzy inference engine, the “min”
operator for connecting multiple antecedents in a rule, the “min”
implication operator, and the “max” aggregation operator have
been used [18]. It is to be noted that the outputs from the in-
ference engine (available at point R in Fig. 4) are fuzzy in na-
ture (i.e., they represent the fuzzy fault type as described in
Table VI). To determine the crisp fault type correctly, these
fuzzy outputs need to be defuzzified. The centroid defuzzifica-
tion scheme has been used for this purpose in this work and, con-
sequently, the actual type of fault is indicated at point S in Fig. 4.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005
The simulation of the FLS scheme shown in Fig. 4 has been car-
ried out by using the fuzzy-logic toolbox in the MATLAB envi-
ronment [19].
In order to utilize the FLS for fault-type identification, the five
input quantities need to be calculated from the available mea-
surements. Now, from (1) and (2), these five quantities depend
only on the symmetrical components of the fundamental during
fault three-phase currents. Hence, for implementing the FLS,
it is necessary to calculate the symmetrical components of the
fundamental during fault currents. For this purpose, in this work,
the half-cycle DFT (HCDFT) technique [17] has been used. The
underlying theory and algorithm of this technique is given in
[17] in detail and, hence, it is not repeated in this paper.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
To test the effectiveness of the proposed fault classifi-
cation scheme, a large number of fault simulation studies
have been carried out in the two-area study system shown in
Fig. 2 using the PSCAD/EMTDC software [20]. The trans-
mission line has been represented using the Bergeron line
model in PSCAD/EMTDC [20]. To test the robustness of the
developed algorithm, the fault simulation studies have been
carried out under wide variation of prefault power angle,
FIA and fault resistance. The different values of , FIA and
which have been chosen for this study are as follows: 1)
2) , and 3)
ohm. Thus, a total of
combinations of , FIA and have been chosen for fault
simulation studies. For each of these combinations, all ten types
of short-circuit faults can be applied at any point on the trans-
mission line. In this work, the fault distances for application of
faults have been chosen as 0.2L, 0.4L, 0.6L, and 0.8L from the
relaying point, where L is the total length of the line. Hence, in
aggregate, different fault simulation studies
are possible. The performance of the proposed scheme has
been checked for all of these 2400 test cases. However, as it is
not feasible to include in the paper all of the numerical results
corresponding to these 2400 test cases due to space limitations,
the output values (which indicate the fault type) obtained from
the FLS results for a few representative test cases are given in
Tables VII–IX. It is to be noted that for each and every fault
simulation study, the fault duration has been assumed to be five
cycles (0.1 s).
Now, from Tables V and VI, if the crisp output of the FLS
lies between 8.5 and 9.5, an “a-g” type of fault would be indi-
cated and the “b-c” type of fault would be indicated if the crisp
output of the FLS lies between 5.5 and 6.5. The other types of
fault would also be indicated by the FLS in a similar fashion,
depending on the crisp output values. Hence, from the results
DAS AND REDDY: FUZZY-LOGIC-BASED FAULT CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR DIGITAL DISTANCE PROTECTION 613

TABLE VII
FLS OUTPUT CORRESPONDING TO  = 10 ; R = 0:0 ohm, FIA = 190

TABLE VIII
FLS OUTPUT CORRESPONDING TO  = 20 ; R = 50:0 ohm, FIA = 10

TABLE IX
FLS OUTPUT CORRESPONDING TO  = 30 ; R = 5:0 ohm, FIA = 30

given in Tables VII–IX, it is observed that the proposed fault TABLE X

NIC UNDER VARIATION OF  (R = 0:0 ohm, FIA = 60 )
classification technique is capable of determining the fault type
accurately in most of the cases. Now, in Tables VII–IX, a total
of 120 test cases have been presented. As can be observed from
these tables, the proposed technique has identified the fault type
correctly in 119 cases out of these 120 test cases. Only in one
case (in Table IX, for an “a-g” fault at 80% distance) the fault
type has been identified incorrectly. The incorrect value is also TABLE XI
shown in that table in italics boldface. However, when FCDFT NIC UNDER VARIATION OF R ( = 30 ; FIA = 90 )
technique instead of HCDFT has been applied for this incorrect
case, the fault types have been identified correctly. Closer exam-
ination revealed that due to incorrect calculation of the funda-
mental components by HCDFT technique, the five inputs as de-
fined in (1) and (2) have been computed incorrectly resulting in
TABLE XII
the incorrect determination of the fault type in this case, whereas NIC UNDER DIFFERENT LINE LENGTH L
the FCDFT technique calculates the fundamental components (R = 25:0 ohm,  = 30 ; FIA = 30 )
correctly. Now it has been mentioned in [17] that the HCDFT
technique is less accurate than the FCDFT technique in com-
puting the fundamental components. Thus, the finding of this
study is also along the same line as that of [17]. Now from the
results in Tables VII–XII, it may appear that the accuracy of the
proposed method with HCDFT is %,
whereas the accuracy with FCDFT is 100%. However, when all 50% of that taken by FCDFT (the difference in time taken by
of the 2400 test results are analyzed, it is found that the accu- these two techniques is about 10 ms in a 50-Hz system). More-
racies with HCDFT and FCDFT are 97.4167% and 98.75%, re- over, the performance of HCDFT is not very bad compared
spectively. Thus, again, the accuracy obtained with FCDFT is to that of FCDFT. In fact, the performances of HCDFT and
better than that available with HCDFT. However, for some test FCDFT can be considered to be quite close to each other. Also,
cases, FCDFT also fails to identify the fault type correctly. it can be expected that in the near future, more accurate DFT
From the above results, it is observed that classification algorithms (both HCDFT and FCDFT) would emerge in the
performance of FCDFT is better than that of HCDFT. Hence, literature, which, if incorporated into the proposed technique,
FCDFT may appear to be the natural choice for this task. How- would enhance the classification accuracy further. Hence, for
ever, it is to be noted that the time taken by HCDFT is roughly an ultra fast protection scheme (where the speed of protection
614
scheme is of foremost concern), HCDFT, instead of FCDFT,
can be used. On the other hand, if speed of protection scheme
is not of topmost consideration, FCDFT over HCDFT may be
preferred.
Moreover, closer observation of the 2400 test results reveals
that the incorrect identification takes place mostly under either
(or any combination) of the following operating conditions:
• high prefault power transfer level (i.e., );
• high fault resistance (i.e., );
• faults away from the relaying point.
The reasons for the inaccuracy in fault classification can be
conjectured as follows. The proposed methodology is based
upon the angular differences between the symmetrical compo-
nents of the during fault currents. Hence, the fault classification
would be perfect if the angular differences obey the relation-
ships given in Table I. As mentioned earlier, the relationships
given in Table I are valid only under prefault no-load condition.
Now, from the superposition principle, the total during fault
current (TDFC) can be considered to be composed of two
components : a) prefault steady-state current (PFSSC) and b)
only fault current (OFC) [(i.e., the fault current in an unloaded
power system]. Under high prefault power-transfer level, the
contribution of PFSSC to TDFC is significant. On the other
hand, under high fault resistance and/or for faults away from
the relaying point, the contribution of OFC to TDFC decreases.
Hence, in both of these cases, the effect of OFC is reduced
in TDFC which, in turn, makes the angular differences de-
viate from the theoretical values (in Table I) or even from the
practical values considered in this paper (given in Table III)
significantly, resulting in an incorrect fault classification. Going
by the same logic, if the prefault power level is enhanced
further, the inaccuracy in fault classification is expected to
increase. Similarly, for a given system, if the fault resistance is
very high, then TDFC would mostly constitute PFSSC. As the
angular difference(s) (between the symmetrical components)
are the same for the steady-state case and symmetrical fault,
for very high fault resistance, any unsymmetrical fault would
probably be misclassified as a symmetrical one.
To investigate into the effect of variation of and fault dis-
tance on the accuracy of the proposed scheme, several simula-
tion studies have been carried out and the results are presented in
Tables X–XII, respectively. For all of these tables, all ten types
of faults have been applied at each of these chosen fault points
(i.e., 0.2L, 0.4L, 0.6L, 0.8L) and the entries in these tables in-
dicate the number of incorrect classifications (NIC) out of ten
faults. It is to be noted that for the results in Tables X–XII, the
HCDFT technique has been employed.
The results presented in Tables X show that when is in-
creased, the inaccuracy of the proposed method also increases.
Also, for any particular value of , NIC, if any, increases as the
distance of the fault increases and is highest for the fault which
occurs at the farthest point (i.e., at a distance of 0.8 L). Similarly,
from the results of Table XI, it is observed that as increases,
NIC also increases and again, for any particular value of , the
NIC increases with increasing fault distance. Thus, the results
obtained in Tables X and XI are in agreement with the explana-
tions given earlier. Moreover, from Table XI, it is observed that
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005
for 100.0 ohm or greater, the estimation accuracy decreases
rapidly. Thus, 100.0 ohm could be considered to be the highest
value of that can be considered by this methodology.
To obtain the results in Table XII, the line length of the system
undertaken has been varied (keeping the per-unit impedance
constant as that of the original system given in the Appendix).
From these results, it is observed that although the proposed
methodology has originally been developed on a 300-km. line,
the performance of it is not very much affected by the variation
of the line length. Only when the line is very long (more that
500 km), the proposed scheme is unable to classify the faults
correctly for faults far away from the relaying point. As the
proposed FLS has essentially been developed from the mean
values given in Table III, it can be said that the values given in
Table III are quite generic enough and are applicable for other
power system configuration also. Actually, the proposed method
is basically utilizing the information of angular differences be-
tween the symmetrical components of the during fault current
for fault classification. As these angular relationships do not de-
pend much on the power system configuration (they only depend
on the operating conditions such as prefault power level, fault
resistance, fault inception angle, etc.), the accuracy of the pro-
posed method is not too much dependent on the power system
configuration under consideration.
Although the accuracy of the proposed method is reasonably
good, before practical implementation, several other issues need
to be considered. These are now discussed below.
1) In the present work, the fault duration has been assumed to
be five cycles. Therefore, the classification performance
of the proposed technique for different fault durations
needs to be ascertained before field implementation. Now
it is to be noted that the proposed technique requires
samples of TDFC for FCDFT whereas, for HCDFT,
samples of TDFC are needed, where N is the
number of samples per fundamental cycle [17]. Hence, if
the fault duration is at least sufficient enough to give at
least samples, the performance of the proposed
technique with either HCDFT or FCDFT would be unaf-
fected. As an example, in this work, a value of
has been chosen for a 50-Hz. system. Hence, if the fault
duration is greater than or equal to 1.025 cycle (corre-
sponding to 82 samples), the performance of the proposed
technique with either HCDFT or FCDFT would remain
the same. If the fault duration is such that only M samples
are available, where , only the
HCDFT technique can be employed. For very short dura-
tion faults (i.e., when , the performance
of the proposed method degrades significantly as neither
FCDFT nor HCDFT can calculate the symmetrical com-
ponents accurately.
2) It may appear at first glance that the approximations in-
volved in Table III may introduce some error in the pro-
posed methodology. However, it is to be noted that the
values in Table III have only been used as guidelines for
developing the FLS which encompass the values of the
five quantities for dif-
ferent types of faults (e.g., the values in Table II). Thus,
DAS AND REDDY: FUZZY-LOGIC-BASED FAULT CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR DIGITAL DISTANCE PROTECTION
TABLE XIII
SOURCE IMPEDANCE CONDITIONS UNDERTAKEN FOR STUDY
the approximations involved in Table III actually helped to
generalize the solution of the fault classification problem
which, in turn, helped the proposed technique to achieve
an accuracy level of more than 97%. Hence, instead of in-
troducing error, the approximations in Table III have ac-
tually helped to improve the performance of the proposed
methodology.
3) A possibility may be thought of developing a fault clas-
sification scheme based on traditional “IF-THEN” rules
which employ the coefficients obtained in Tables VII–IX.
However, it is to be noted that to obtain the values in
Tables VII–IX, the FLS proposed in this paper needs to
be used (these values are actually the outputs of FLS).
Thus, for any traditional “IF-THEN” rule-based scheme
(based on the coefficients in Tables VII–IX), the use of the
proposed FLS cannot be avoided. Hence, no alternative
and equally effective traditional scheme employing the
coefficients in Tables VII–IX can be developed, which
can possibly replace the proposed FLS altogether.
4) In this work, while carrying out the simulation studies,
the source impedances at both sides have been assumed
to be constant. However, in reality, depending upon the
system condition at both the sending end (SE) and re-
ceiving ends (REs), the source impedances may vary. To
study the performance of the proposed algorithm in this
case, the source impedance(s) at both the sides have been
varied as outlined in Table XIII and under each of the
conditions given in Table XIII, a large number of simu-
lation studies have been carried out under various com-
bination of fault location , FIA, and . Comparison of
the results thus obtained with those obtained with constant
source impedance indicates that the variation of source
impedance has a very negligible impact on the accuracy
of the proposed technique.
5) Based upon the results given in Tables VII–XII, it is ob-
served that the proposed algorithm is fairly accurate under
the following conditions of faults: 1) the fault is not very
far away from the relay point (i.e., fault distance is within
0.8 L); 2) prefault power flow is not very high (i.e., varies
from 0 to 30 ; 3) fault resistance is not very high (i.e.,
varies from 0.0 to 50 ohm); and 4) line length is not very
high (L is limited to 400 km). As the proposed FLS has
been developed based on the results given in Table III, it
615
TABLE XIV
NIC UNDER DIFFERENT LEVEL OF NOISE
(R = 25:0 ohm,  = 30 ; FIA = 30 )
can be concluded that the values of the five quantities (i.e.,
) more or less follow the
data given in Table III when the above four conditions are
satisfied. However, when these four conditions are not sat-
isfied, the five quantities may not take the values given in
Table III.
6) In this work, it has been assumed that all of the sampled
fault current values are accurate (i.e., they contain no mea-
surement error). However, in real life, no meter is abso-
lutely free of noise or error. Hence, it is worthwhile to in-
vestigate the effect of measurement noise on the accuracy
of the proposed technique. Toward this end, it has been as-
sumed that the measured sampled values of the current are
corrupted with measurement noise. The noise has been as-
sumed to be Gaussian in nature with zero mean and known
standard deviation . Table XIV shows the NIC for dif-
ferent levels of . From this table, it is observed that even
when the noise standard deviation is 25%, the accuracy
of the proposed methodology remains intact. Now, as the
present day available meters are quite accurate % ,
it can be said that the measurement noise does not affect
the accuracy of the proposed technique.
From the above simulation results, it is found that the perfor-
mance of the proposed technique is quite acceptable. It would
have been worthwhile to test the performance of the proposed
methodology on actual field data. However, because of the non-
availability of reliable fault data from the field, this exercise
could not be taken up in this present work. Nevertheless, as the
simulation results have been carried out on an industry-accepted
electromagnetic transient simulation software PSCAD/EMTDC
[20], it can be expected that the performance of the proposed
scheme would remain at more or less the same level as that re-
ported in this paper.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a fuzzy-logic-based fault-type identification
scheme has been proposed. The main conclusions of this work
are as follows.
1) Only three measurements (three line current measure-
ments) are sufficient to implement this technique.
2) The proposed technique is able to identify all ten types of
short-circuit faults accurately.
3) The time taken by this method is about 10 ms (for a 50-Hz
system).
4) The accuracy of the proposed method is quite high (i.e.,
more than 97%).
5) The proposed method is quite effective over a wide range
of a prefault power level, fault resistance, and fault incep-
tion angle.
616 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005

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RBF neural network with OLS learning procedure,” IEEE Trans. Power in 1998, with a specialization in electric power systems.
Delivery, vol. 16, pp. 473–477, Oct. 2001. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical En-
[5] T. Dalstein and B. Kulicke, “Neural network approach to fault classifi- gineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (formerly the University of
cation for high speed protective relaying,” IEEE Trans. Power Delivery, Roorkee, India). His research interests include distribution automation, flexible
vol. 10, pp. 1002–1011, Apr. 1995. ac transmission systems (FACTS), power system harmonics, and power system
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[8] A. L. O. Fernandez and N. K. I. Ghonaim, “A novel approach using a J. Vittal Reddy received the M.Tech. degree in electrical engineering (power
FIRANN for fault detection and direction estimation for high voltage systems) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India, in 2003.
transmission lines,” IEEE Trans. Power Delivery, vol. 17, pp. 894–901, Currently, he is a Software Engineer with Tata Consultancy Services, New
Oct. 2002. Delhi, India.