Autonomous control strategy for fault management in distribution networks

In this paper, the application of autonomous control on automatic switches in electric power distribution networks is proposed. The key feature for the proposed control strategy is based on a decentralized control aiming to automatically isolate the faulty section while reducing the overall dependency on the number of fault indicators and communication hops involved in the fault management process. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed control strategy, its behavior is compared with the centralized and distributed agent-based decentralized switching control methods. Different aspects are considered in the evaluation such as the number of activated communication hops and the corresponding communication latency. A practical network configuration is utilized in order to verify the proposed decentralized control strategy for the fault management. The results corroborate the efficacy of the proposed autonomous decentralized algorithm for fault management in distribution networks.