UAV-Assisted Fault Location in Power Distribution Systems: An Optimization Approach

Improvement of reliability indices and decreasing the energy not supplied are two main purposes of the power distribution systems' operator. Installation of visual or remote fault indicators (FIs) can significantly contribute to achieving these goals. However, installation of these types of FIs in areas with limited or no communication coverage is not practical. This paper presents a novel conceptual structure for application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in distribution systems. In the proposed framework, UAV-based FIs (UFIs) which are installed in the non-coverage areas, communicate with the UAVs and send their signals to them when a fault occurs in downstream. We formulate an optimization problem to find the optimal number of UFIs and UAVs as well as their locations, taking both communication and investment constraints into consideration. To evaluate the effectiveness of the presented framework, simulation results are presented and discussed for bus 6 of the IEEE-RBTS.