A Study on the Application of Hausdorff Distance to Support Fault Identification in Distribution Systems

Currently, loads of various types of consumers are increasingly sensitive to power variations and interruptions. Most of the time, power supply failures are the result of faults in distribution systems, which interfere with the reliability of power supply and can result in voltage sags, momentary and sustained outages, and high operating costs. Utilities are aware of the problem and are working to develop efficient solutions to improve their reliability and availability indices. In this sense, different techniques for fault detection and fault location (LF) are studied aiming at the fast restoration of service in case of system occurrences. This paper presents an algorithm that can be used as decision support for electric system managers, indicating the faulty region of the distribution system and presenting an approximate location of the fault, in case of a feeder fault. The method uses the similarity between current signals and the Hausdorff distance to achieve this goal. Preliminary tests reveal that the proposed method is very promising in indicating the faulty region in a complex distribution system composed of dynamic loads and distributed generation.