Fault section estimation in power systems Based on improved honey-bee mating optimization

This paper introduces an improved version of Honey Bee Mating Optimization (IHBMO) algorithm to solve the fault section estimation (FSE) problem. FSE is introduced as an optimization problem, where the objective function includes the status of protective relays and circuit breakers. The main problem of standard HBMO is that the inappropriate selection of the parameters may affect the local search. Also, this affects the computation time. So, an improvement is introduced to the standard HBMO to enhance the local search capability in order to reach the best solution with better computation efficiency. To ensure the validity of the IHBMO algorithm, two sample systems are examined with different test cases. Furthermore, the results obtained by the proposed algorithm are compared with those obtained via other several methods. The results show the accuracy and high computation efficiency of IHBMO.