2019 IEEE International Conference on Power, Electrical, and Electronics and Industrial Applications (PEEIACON) 29 November - 01 December,

2019, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

An Intelligent Approach of Fault Classification and

Localization of a Power Transmission Line
Shahriar Rahman Fahim1 , Yeahia Sarker2 , Omar Kamrul Islam1 , Subrata K. Sarker3 ,
Md. Fatin Ishraque3 , and Sajal K. Das2
1,3
Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, 2 Department of Mechatronics Engineering
3
Varendra University, Rajshahi, Bangladesh
1,2
Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology, Rajshahi-6204, Bangladesh,
Email: fahim.fact@gmail.com; yeahia.ruet@gmail.com; omarkamrul.akash@gmail.com;
skshuvo138008@gmail.com; fatineeeruet@gmail.com; das.k.sajal@gmail.com

Abstract—This paper depicts an approach with an artificial
neural network (ANN) for classification and localization of faults
on the power transmission line. A huge number of transmission
and distribution lines are used for the transportation of electrical
energy in the power system. Moreover, developing a completely
reliable system is not possible within the economic and technical
limitations. So, there always remains a probability of faults in the
transmission lines. When occurs, it is aimed to locate and classify
the fault to restore the sound condition of the transmission line.
For analyzing the transmission line fault, this paper adopts the
fault-tolerant neural network-based method as it can process
incomplete and noisy data. This approach can deal with non-
linear problems and can carry out the prediction if trained.
Feedforward neural networks along with the backpropagation
algorithm are used each of the three phases of the transmission
line for the fault localization process. The proposed method uses
the instantaneous measure of the fault current to return the fault
type and the distance from the experimental end. The modeling
of the power system and the development of the neural network
for this method have been conducted in the MATLAB/Simulink
environment. The simulation results illustrated in this paper
manifests that the proposed model is promising in performance.
I. I NTRODUCTION
There has been a rapid growth of power system around the
world in recent times. Throughout this widespread power net-
work, the electrical energy is transported from the generation
end to the consumer end. Thus, the smooth operation of the
power transmission line is necessitated to ensure a reliable and
uninterrupted electric power to the end-users. However, the
smooth operation of the power line is hindered by the faults
in the power system. The fault is said to be occured when
abnormal current flows through the power system components
[1]. To restore the good state of the power line, accurate fault
localization and classification is required. The classification
of fault is important as a different type of faults call for
different resolves and actions. Moreover, locating a fault is
also important for the engineers for network planning and
operation.
The motivation of this work is to analyze the fault of
power transmission and distribution lines while taking into
account both accuracy and fastness. A couple of technique
is employed for the fault analyzing purpose. Nevertheless, no
appropriate fault-locating scheme performs the best in distinct
fault scenarios [2]. An economical impedance measurement-
based technique performs best for a smaller amount of fault
impedance. Greater accuracy for high impedance fault is ob-
tained with the traveling wave-based technique. However, this
system is costly and prone to noise. An artificial intelligence-
based approach such as neural network, fuzzy logic, and
neuro-fuzzy logic are adopted for obtaining high accuracy
and as they remain unaffected by the system condition. In
this paper, the fault analyzing and resolving is performed with
the ANN-based technique as it is one of the most primitive
ways for transmission line fault analysis and resolving. ANN
is also capable of learning complex input-output mapping
and thus have a strong pattern recognition and classification.
Successful implementation of ANN in different sectors of the
power system are demonstrated in modern times including load
forecasting [3]–[5], protection [6]–[8] and fault analysis [9].
LG
LG
fault
Fault locator
ANN
3 phase
Three phase LLG
current Type of LLG Fault
Transmis sion
fault fault
Fault locator
location
line ANN
LLLG
LLLG
Fault locator
fault
ANN
Fault locator
Fig. 1: Basic block diagram of fault analysis system
In Fig.1 the basic block diagram of the fault analysis system
is illustrated. A 1000 km three-phase power transmission
line with 11 kV generating station is simulated for three
different types of ground fault located at different point of
the power line. The system is provided with three inputs for
fault classification and localization. The fault classifier neural
network first takes the currents of each phase of a three-
phase transmission line as an input. The value of three-phase
currents differs for various fault types and fault location from
the measuring end. Based on these, three different types of
ground faults are considered for developing the dataset. The
dataset is consists of 297 input-output samples (99 for each
of the three types of faults). The outputs of the fault classifier
neural network are of a boolean form. Which indicates whether
a particular type of fault is present or not. A specific pattern
represents each of the three faults accordingly. The proposed
neural network is capable of accurately distinguish the pattern
between the three categories of ground faults. The performance
of the fault classifier neural network is validated by cross-
entropy measurement and the confusion matrix.
In the case of fault localization, Three different neural

978-1-7281-5561-6/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE 53

network model is developed to predict the fault location.
The fault resistance has been kept constant at 0.25. the fault
distance has varied at an incremental factor of every 10 km
on a 1000 km transmission line. Once the fault locator neural
network is trained, its performance is checked by plotting the
linear regression plot that co-relates the targets to the outputs.
In the previous literature, experts research on several meth-
ods regarding the transmission line fault analysis [10], [11].
Some approaches regarding impedance-based fault location
Voltage and
Current
Source 1
1000 Km line
11 kV
Fault Intelligent
fault detection
and
localization
system
50Hz
3-Phase series
RLC load
Fig. 2: Power system model for fault analysis
methods are addressed in [12]. This method is economical
and easy to implement though its accuracy depends on the
measurement accuracy of the line parameters, load value,
and effect of fault resistance [13]. Traveling wave method is
introduced in [14] which is based on the principle of trans-
mission and reflection of the traveling waves between the line
terminal and the fault location. The method is independent of
the network configuration and installed devices in a network.
However, The requires GPS, fault transient detectors to capture
the transient waveform, which makes this approach costly.
For the fault analysis task, various artificial intelligence-
based algorithms are intensively implemented by researchers
in modern times. A Fuzzy logic-based classification scheme
was proposed in [15], which detects identify the type of fault
in transmission systems. The results in [16] and [15] show
that the Fuzzy logic technique is quite satisfactory in fault
classification and location. The difficulty of fuzzy logic is to
determine the global minimum using the fuzzy membership
functions. Another knowledge-based approach is the support
vector machine (SVM). In [17], SVM approach is used to
determine the fault type and the fault location of a long
power transmission line. The simulation results depict a good
classification accuracy with least fault position error. A Genetic
algorithm (GA) technique addressed in [18] searches the
probable fault location by the crossover, selection and mutation
operations to determine the exact fault location. the simulation
speed can be improved and the dimension of possible solutions
can be lessened with this technique. The limitation of GA
is that its results are not constant over time because almost
all processes are random in GA. The state of art Artificial
Neural Network (ANN) based approach is mentioned in [19] &
[20]. The ANN is simplistic in implementation and has greater
efficiency in fault classification and localization compared to
the other methods [9].
In this paper, the fault classification and localization are
provided for the phase-to-ground fault of a three-phase trans-
54
mission line with ANN-based approach. The performance of
the proposed neural network-based approach is validated with
the confusion matrix, cross-entropy measurement, and the
linear regression plot. Which shows that the neural network
architectures that are adopted for classification of three differ-
ent types of line to ground faults and for fault localization are
promising in performance.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section
II describes the modeling of the power system network. In
section III the fault classification technique is illustrated. The
training and testing of the neural network for fault localization
are explained in section IV. The overall testing result of the
system is represented in section V. A concluding part of the
paper is drawn in section VI.
II. P OWER SYSTEM MODEL
An 11kV power system network with 1000 km transmission
line is modeled in the Simulink environment as shown in Fig.2.
At the power generation end, there is an 11 kV three-phase
power generator. A three-phase series RLC load is attached
to the network at another end. The line frequency for the
network is considered as 50 Hz. The simulation is performed
for three different types of faults (i.e. LG, LLG, LLLG
faults) at different locations of the transmission line. The
individual line current of three-phase for each fault condition is
measured employing the three-phase V-I measurement block.
The collected data is used for the training and testing of the
neural network for fault analysis.
III. FAULT CLASSIFICATION
A. Training of fault classifier neural network
The adapted neural network is consists of three inputs and
three outputs. The current of each phase of a three-phase
transmission line is fed to the network for classifying the
inputs into a set of desired categories. The outputs are either 1
which signifies the presence of a distinct type of fault or 0 for
the absence of a particular fault type. Each type of fault has an
identical pattern. The neural network outputs for each type of
fault is illustrated in Table I. The training dataset for the fault
TABLE I: Neural network output for different types of ground
fault
Network outputs
Fault type
A B C
LG 1 0 0
LLG 0 1 0
LLLG 0 0 1
classification is made of 297 input-output sets. For each type
of fault, 99 data is recorded by simulating the power system
with three types of faults located in a different point of the
transmission line. The neural network is trained repeatedly by
varying the number of hidden-layer neurons until an acceptable
generalization of the network is achieved. The 3-30-3 neural
network architecture is preferred for the fault classification as it
returns better results than the other experimented architecture.
B. Testing of Fault classifier neural network
After successful training of the neural network, it is tested
to observe if it is good enough to return the desired output
when a new data is presented to it. The output result is
 1.2
assessed by the confusion matrix to validate the success rate of
Test
the classification process. Ideally, if there exists no confusion
Validation
in the classification process it means the percentage should 1 Train
be 100. An acceptable error depends on the type of data
handled to train the neural network. Once the neural network
reaches the threshold error requirements, it can be used for 0.8
the classification purpose. The training, testing, validation and
overall confusion matrix are showed in Fig.3. From the figure,
0.6
it is observed that the neural network model classifies the fault
with 84.5 % overall accuracy.
Training Confusion Matrix Validation Confusion Matrix 0.4
X: 109
66 1 7 89.18% 15 2 4 71.4%
LG LG Y: 0.230
31.4% 0.5% 3.4% 11.0% 33.3% 4.4% 8.9% 28.6%
0.2
4 63 13 78.8% LL 0 15 2 88.2% 0 20 40 60 80 100 120
Output Class

Output Class

LLG 1.9% 30.4% 6.3% 21.3% 0.0% 33.3% 4.4% 11.8%

G
Epoch
2 4 48 88.9% LLL 0 0 7 100%
LLLG
1.0% 1.9% 23.2% 11.1% G 0.0% 0.0% 15.6% 0.0% Fig. 4: Cross-entropy performance for the neural network
model
91.5% 92.6% 70.6% 85.0% 100% 88.2% 53.8% 82.2%
8.5% 7.4% 29.4% 15.0% 0.0% 11.8% 46.2% 17.8%
faster though consumes more memory. As the developed neu-
LG LLG LLLG LG LLG LLLG
Target Class Target Class
ral network is not a complex one, the Bayesian Regularization
(a)
algorithm has been adopted.
(b)
Test Confusion Matrix All Confusion Matrix
B. Testing of fault locater neural network
11 1 3 73.3% 91 4 14 83.5%
LG 1
24.4% 2.2% 6.7% 26.7% 30.6% 1.3% 4.7% 16.5% The neural network architecture for each type of fault is
shown in Table II. These architectures perform promising
1 13 1 86.7% 5 91 16 81.3%
among the several other architectures that are tested earlier.
Output Class

2
Output Class

LLG 2.2% 28.9% 2.2% 13.3% 1.7% 30.6% 5.4% 18.8%

The overall regression fit depicts in Fig.5 shows how much
1 0 14 93.3% 3 4 69 90.8%
LLLG
2.2% 0.0% 31.1% 6.7%
3
0.0% 0.0% 15.6% 9.2%
the neural networks have been generalized for the inputs. The
regression fit for LG fault shows a lack of closeness between
84.6%
15.4%
92.9%
7.1%
77.8%
22.2%
84.4%
15.6%
91.9%
8.1%
91.9%
8.1%
69.7%
30.3%
84.5%
15.5%
the target data and the outputs (r= 0.9117). In the case of the
LLG and LLLG faults, the closeness between the targets and
LG LLG LLLG LG LLG LLLG
Target Class Target Class the outputs are comparatively higher (r= 0.9817 for LLG and
(c) (d) r= 0.9470 for LLLG) than the LG fault.
Fig. 3: Confusion matrix for fault classification V. OVERALL RESULTS
After training the developed neural network, it is then tested
Another factor used in the testing process is the cross- for several types of fault data simulated in the power system
entropy performance of the neural network. The total dataset is model. In Table III the results of fault classification, fault
divided into three categories namely the training, testing, and localization and the amount of error are listed. The error
validation dataset. During the training process, the validation estimation is performed using (1). The different architecture
dataset is provided and the error in the validation dataset is of the neural network works with different accuracy. The
monitored. The validation dataset estimates the model’s skill accuracy also varies for different fault location from the
and tunes the hyperparameters. After that, the test dataset is measuring end. Some unforeseen data for faults the nearest
used to provide an unbiased evaluation of the final model. to and the farthest from the measuring end is fed to the neural
The cross-entropy performance for the neural network model network for testing. Other than some extreme cases the neural
is shown in Fig.4. It is shown from the figure is that the test network seems fine for fault localization and classification.
and validation curves efficiently follows a similar path to the Actualvalue − M easuredvalue
training curve. The best validation performance indicated in %error = (1)
Actualvalue
the figure is 0.230 at epoch 109.
VI. CONCLUTION
IV. FAULT LOCALIZATION The simplicity of the neural network algorithms used in
this thesis makes it their best feature. Only the three phase
A. Training of fault locater neural network
currents have been utilized as the inputs to predict the type
Three different fault locator neural networks are trained for of fault and fault location by neural networks. Here the
three types of faults. Each neural network is consists of three fault types include the three grounded faults only. Bayesian
input perceptrons and one output perceptrons that returns the Regularization algorithm has been applied due to its superior
fault location. The inputs are the three-phase currents just feature for solving noisy datasets. The neural network system
after the fault. For training the neural network, the Bayesian works on his own to develop the hidden relation between
Regularization algorithm is used other than the Levenberg- the fault currents and the fault types and fault locations.
Marquardt algorithm. The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is An identical approach can be taken for any other power

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 1000 Data 1000 Data 1000 Data
Fit Fit Fit
Y=T Y=T Y=T

Output ~= 0.85*Target + 70
Output ~= 0.83*Target + 90

Output ~=0.86*Target + 78
800 800 800

600 600 600

400 400 400

200 200 200

0 0 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 0 200 400 600 800 1000 0 200 400 600 800 1000
Target Target Target
(a) (b) (c)

Fig. 5: Regression fit for fault localization

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