Distributed approach in fault localisation and service restoration: State-of-the-Art and future direction

Abstract: This paper presents a survey of recent development in Fault Localisation

and Service Restoration (FLSR) following electrical disturbance in Power Distribution

Systems (PDS) based on distributed approaches. Distributed approaches have been

found to fit well in the distribution systems as they have more than one decisionmaking

component, and data processing can be done in parallel in individual units

that makes it faster and requires less processing capabilities centrally. Recently

reported distributed approaches have been studied and analysed. With evergrowing

integration of the renewable distributed generation (DG) into the distribution

systems, it has been realised that, the uncertainty nature of both load demand

and DG need to be considered in the service restoration problems for improved

efficiency. Consideration of uncertainty nature of the renewable generation and

load demands in the distributed FLSR result into the increased restored customers

as well as avoiding overloading and underloading after restoration. The paper starts

with a general overview of the Multi Agent Systems (MAS) as the distributed control

approach and approaches for forecasting load demand and DG power and then

discusses different approaches used for FLSR in PDS by showing their strengths and

limitations. The review is concluded by giving future research directions.