Design and Architecture for Anti-Hidden Faults Multiagent Protection System in Smart Grids

The sensitivity of modern day smart devices and the continuously evolving power system into smart grid has raised the level of requirements from protection systems to zero-tolerance for hidden faults. Researchers have continuously proposed various protection schemes to enhance the performance of protection systems. However, high resistance hidden faults could still pass undetected for most of the proposed schemes or could be detected but suffer from high requirements of phasor measurement units (PMUs) or low confidence in the scheme decision. In this paper, an Anti-hidden fault multiagent protection system (AHF-MPS) is proposed that detects hidden faults with minimal PMU requirements and high confidence level in the detection decision. The AHF-MPS employs PMUs as primary agents which detects the periodic change in the phase angle of positive sequence currents that arises due to fault incidents. The second step of AHF-MPS is to initiate an accelerating factor to overcurrent protection devices acting as secondary agents. The system was tested upon IEEE 34 testing system and the results showed successful detection of hidden faults with operating times ranging from 77 ms up to 432 ms depending on fault location. That proved its ability in detecting hidden faults with minimal requirements proving its superiority to its peers.