Decentralized Agent-Based Protection Coordination for Distribution Networks with Renewable Distributed Generations using Intelligent Electronic Devices

By increasing the penetration level of renewable distributed generations and increasing the size of the distribution networks, the more number of agent-based protection systems with its communication infrastruture will be used. Such systems play a vital role in the protection system to detect the faults and maintain the protection coordination. Despite the fast and reliable nature of multi-agent systems, there is a possibility of poor performance especially in protection coordination schemes with heavy communication load. For this purpose, this paper presents an intelligent self-healing method under fault conditions, which provides the protection coordination in a single control level without dependence on a higher communication level. The decentralized performance of the proposed scheme is expressed by using intelligent electronic devices and distributed communication. Accordingly, the coordination is done using the high-speed point-to-point communication capability of the IEC-61850 GOOSE protocol. Also, to avoid power outages due to the protection system malfunction, an algorithm independent of DG peneration and based on GOOSE message service mechanism is proposed, which does not need a central processor. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated under different scenarios in a practical distribution network using ETAP software environment.