A Travelling Wave-Based Fault Location Strategy Using the Concepts of Metric Dimension and Vertex Covers in a Graph

This paper presents a novel travelling wave-based placement strategy and fault detection scheme to locate faults on complex power grids. A fault occurring on a power grid results in travelling waves propagating from the fault location towards detectors. In this paper, the power grid is transformed to a simple, weighted, undirected graph and the shortest path information is leveraged using two well-known graph invariants to place detectors and detect and locate faults accurately. An offline algorithm is presented to determine the number and position of detectors, while an online algorithm is proposed for locating the fault. The proposed fault detection algorithm is benchmarked using the IEEE 30-bus distribution system.