IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 29, NO.

1, FEBRUARY 2014

251

Fault Location in Distribution Systems

Based on Smart Feeder Meters
Fernanda C. L. Trindade, Student Member, IEEE, Walmir Freitas, Member, IEEE, and
Jos C. M. Vieira, Member, IEEE

AbstractThis paper proposes a fault-location method based

on smart feeder meters with voltage sag monitoring capability.
The main idea is to explore voltage measurements from monitors
placed in different buses of distribution systems to estimate the
fault location. The estimation is achieved by relating the voltage
deviation measured by each meter to the fault current calculated
based on the bus impedance matrix, considering the fault in
different points. In order to improve the method accuracy, the
loads are represented by constant impedance models and included
into the bus impedance matrix. The performance of the proposed
method is demonstrated by using a real distribution system.
Sensitivity studies results show that the method is robust since
it has good performance for different values of fault resistance,
quantity, and location of the smart meters.
Index TermsFault location, power distribution, smart feeder
meter, voltage measurement.

I. INTRODUCTION

OTIVATED by the recent advances in communication and measurement systems, utilities have been
seeking efficient solutions for improving distribution systems
monitoring and automation. These advances include two-way
communication of the meter, data-management system, and
real-time access to information, such as consumption, voltage
sags, power outages, etc. [1], [2]. As a result, smart feeder and
consumer meters can achieve potential applications beyond
meter reading for billing purposes. For example, in [3], the
usage of feeder meters, which are installed in primary networks, is discussed as a cost-effective solution for distribution
monitoring and automation.
An important potential application of those meters is related
to fault management, since faults result in outages and lead to
reliability and power-quality (PQ) problems such as voltage
sags, temporary and sustained interruptions, and high operational costs. In this context, one of the main issues related to

Manuscript received January 28, 2013; revised May 17, 2013; accepted June
25, 2013. Date of publication July 16, 2013; date of current version January
21, 2014. This work was supported by FAPESP, CAPES, Brazil, and CAPES,
Brazil. Paper no. TPWRD-00127-2013.
F. C. L. Trindade and W. Freitas are with the Department of Electrical Energy
Systems, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas 13083-852, Brazil
(e-mail: fernanda@ieee.org; walmir@ieee.org).
J. C. M. Vieira is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sao Carlos School of Engineering/USP, So Carlos 13566-590, Brazil
(e-mail: jose.vieira@ieee.org).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2013.2272057

fault management are fault-location techniques [4] since reasonably high-accuracy fault-location schemes enable reducing
costs and time for energy supply restoration.
Traditionally, in distribution systems, fault-location techniques are based on manual outage mapping using consumers
calls, fundamental voltage, and current components measured
only at the substation and network electrical parameters. However, several methods have been recently proposed to take
advantage of advanced metering systems. There are methods
based on automated outage mapping [5], [6] or voltage sag
source detection [7][10], which indicate a probable area
(region) that may contain the faulted bus instead of pointing
out a strict fault location. There are also invasive methods.
For instance, in [11], the fault-location method requires the
injection of sinusoidal signals with two different frequencies
into the faulted distribution line. Thus, by using signal extraction techniques and mathematical processing, permanent
single-phase-to-ground faults can be located.
Another class of methods uses the voltage and current
measured at the substation, sparse voltage measurements, and
the network electrical parameters to estimate the fault location
[12][14]. Their performance can be considerably affected by
the fault resistance, and additional solutions are necessary in
order to deal with this uncertainty. For instance, an iterative
process dedicated to fault resistance estimation is used in [13].
These additional techniques can increase the complexity of the
fault-location methods.
In order to overcome some of the drawbacks observed in previous fault-location methods and aggregate value to the smart
feeder meters, this work proposes a robust fault-location technique that explores the voltage sag measurement capability of
these devices and fundamentals of the short-circuit theory. Once
a fault is detected and classified, the proposed method can be
used to locate faults at the distribution system by using measurements from smart meters installed at the primary network.
These smart feeder meters, which will be referred to simply as
feeder meters in this paper, can be polled (triggered) everytime a fault is detected to provide the information demanded by
the proposed method under request [15]. Sensitivity study results have shown that the proposed method presents good performance for different values of fault resistance, quantity, and
location of the feeder meters as well as measurement and load
estimation errors.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II presents the
proposed method as well as a general view of how the feeder
meters can be used to improve the fault-location methods.
Sections IIIV provide simulation results and sensitivity

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analyses, respectively, to evaluate the performance of the

proposed method. The method performance considering the
presence of dynamic loads is presented in Section VI. Discussions about the proposed method compared to other methods are
shown in Section VII. Conclusions are given in Section VIII.
II. PROPOSED FAULT-LOCATION METHOD
The proposed fault-location method is based on the monitoring capability of feeder meters and on short-circuit theory.
According to [15], several smart meter models are able to report
outages and measure voltage with an accuracy class that typically ranges from 0.1 to 0.5%. The main idea of the proposed
method for fault location is to exploit such capability, so that the
voltage sag information can be processed to calculate a fault-location index, which indicates the bus closest to the fault point.
Everytime a fault is detected, the meters are polled to provide the
voltage rms value just before and during the fault occurrence. In
addition, in the results presented here, the voltage rms value was
calculated by using a sampling rate of 64 samples/cycle. The
theoretical background of the method is presented as follows.
By using the voltage magnitude measured by a feeder meter,
it is possible to obtain the voltage deviation
as follows:

Fig. 1. Illustration of the index

meaning

obtained based on different meters will be distinct from each

other.
Based on the aforementioned explanation, a fault-location
index can be used to identify the actual bus under fault. This
index is given by the sum of the differences between the
estimated fault current values taking into consideration that bus
is under fault and their average value (each difference is referred to as
), as shown in (3) and Fig. 1

(1)
where the subscript is related to a feeder meter installed at
and
are the voltage magnitudes measured
bus ;
during and before the fault (prefault), respectively; and superscript
represents each phase, so that one has the voltage deviation on phase , , and . If the bus is under fault, one
can estimate the fault current at each phase by using the voltage
deviation determined by meter based on the following expression:
for

(2)

where
is the
3
3 submatrix from the system
, as discussed in
three-phase bus impedance matrix
Appendix A, and
is the fault current calculated by
using the voltage measurement from meter and considering
a fault at bus . Note that the loads, represented by constant
impedance models, must be included into the bus impedance
matrix to improve the method accuracy. In order to include
the loads in the bus impedance matrix, all of the loads are represented by constant impedance models. Then, the equivalent
shunt impedances associated with the bus are included at the
matrix elements [16]. The load estimation can be done by using
typical load curves or based on the information provided by
smart consumer meters. The influence of the loads in method
performance is analyzed in Section IV-A. and in Appendix A.
Therefore, if one has
meters, there are
estimated
fault currents based on the assumption that the bus under fault
is bus . If the fault really occurred at bus , all of the estimated
currents must have practically the same value, which is close to
the real value. On the other hand, if the fault occurred at any
other bus, there will be an error on the fault current estimated
based on measurements from each meter . In addition, the error

(3)
where
is the fault current calculated for phase
with
measurements from the feeder meter at bus using (2), and
is the average of all the fault current values calculated
using the voltage measured at each feeder meter for bus . As
mentioned before, if the bus under analysis is the faulted bus, all
of the estimated currents will be practically the same. Thus, the
bus associated with the minimum
is selected as the faulted
bus.
Typically, feeder meters supply only voltage magnitudes;
however, in (2) and (3), currents are written as phasor quantities. In order to numerically calculate these expressions, it was
assumed that phases , , and are simply shifted by 120 ,
although distribution systems are unbalanced. Note that such
an assumption was used only for calculation purposes. In the
results presented in this paper, the system was unbalanced so
that the phase currents are not really shifted by 120 ; even so,
the proposed method shows good performance. The influence
of this assumption is investigated in Section V. When only
voltage magnitude is used, there is no need for synchronization;
since all meters are simultaneously polled by the same fault
event, decreasing the costs and complexity.
For certain situations, numerically, the minimum may be
associated with more than one bus , indicating multiple estimation. In order to deal with such cases and improve the method
performance, automated outage mapping can be used, as described in the following section.
A. Automated Outage Mapping
The communication among the feeder and consumer meters
and the control center allows monitoring de-energized meters
and, consequently, determining the part of the network that is

TRINDADE et al.: FAULT LOCATION IN DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

Fig. 2. Distribution feeder outage mapping.

de-energized. By incorporating data from the geographic information system (GIS), the outage mapping can speed up and automate the typical manual process of fault location, which depends on consumer calls.
With smart meters, one can automatically build the outage
mapping by monitoring the de-energized transponders. As a result, the chances of indicating a wrong bus as the faulted bus
and multiple estimation occurrences can be minimized or even
eliminated. An example of such an application can be observed
in the feeder of Fig. 2. In this system, if a fault occurs downstream the recloser R1 (fault 1), it will cause its opening, and
the feeder meters M3 to M6 would report the outage in Zone
1. Therefore, the fault-location method could consider this information in order to decrease the search space as well as the
chances of indicating the wrong bus as the faulted bus. In case
of fault 2, if the fuse F3 blows, outage mapping would indicate
a fault occurrence in an even reduced zone (Zone 2), since M3
would be the only meter to report the outage.
The outage mapping can be combined with the proposed
fault-location method using two different approaches as
follows.
The first option consists in exploring the outage mapping
to decrease the search space in the fault-location process.
In this case, the computing demand is reduced. However,
this alternative requires polling several meters in order to
identify the affected zone, increasing the data traffic.
The second option is based on applying outage mapping
only in cases of multiple estimation, so that specific meters
are polled in order to support the decision of which local
refers to the affected one. In comparison to the first option,
even though the entire feeder is used as the search space
of the fault-location method (increasing the computational
effort), the data traffic is reduced.
Regardless of computational effort and data traffic, both options give the same results, and, in the following sections, the
first option will be employed.
B. Method Guidelines
The steps below summarize the method application after a
fault has been detected:
Step 1) Construct the bus impedance matrix
(this step
can be done offline).

253

Step 2) Read the voltage deviation measurements from the

feeder meters.
Step 3) Estimate the fault current
of every bus in the
system by using the feeder meters measurements,
the matrix
and (2).
.
Step 4) Calculate the average fault current
Step 5) Calculate the fault current index for each bus in
the system by using (3).
Step 6) Indicate the bus associated with the lowest
value
as the faulted bus.
Step 7) If more than one bus (region) is pointed as the faulted
bus, automated outage mapping can be used to solve
the problem of multiple estimation.
In Step 1), as discussed previously, it is necessary to include
the loads represented by constant impedance models in the
bus impedance matrix. This can be done by using typical load
curves, which give information about the load behavior in
the time, or smart costumer meters, which report active and
reactive powers each time interval. The bus impedance matrix
can be built offline taking into consideration the interval of load
update, for example, each 1 hour, or online each time a fault is
detected by using the correspondent information.
III. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, base case results are presented to further explain and test the proposed method and the influence of the
outage mapping. In the next section, a complete sensitivity study
will be discussed to evaluate the method performance, taking
into consideration the impact of inaccurate load estimation, unknown fault resistance, inaccurate voltage measurements and
variation of feeder meter quantity and location.
The proposed fault-location scheme was tested in a real,
13.8-kV distribution system shown in Fig. 3, which was obtained from [12] and [17]. All of the data and distances are
presented in Appendix B, including the impedance associated
with each conductor. The voltage measurements at each feeder
meter were obtained by using the Alternative Transients Program (ATP) simulations [18]. Each line section was modeled
in ATP by using phase impedance matrices. Initially, the feeder
meters were placed at the following buses: 3, 20, 30, 45, 51,
60, 100, 111, 118, 121, 127, 129, 134 (as shown in Fig. 3). This
allocation was done arbitrarily without previous studies.
In order to assess the results, an error index was defined as
shown in (4), where the distances are obtained in relation to the
substation.
Error

real fault distance

calculated fault distance

(4)

The tests were conducted considering single-phase (phase

A-to-ground) and three-phase faults. In case of single-phase
faults, only the short-circuit current of the faulted phase was
used in the method. In addition, it was assumed that the fault
has been already detected and classified since the proposed
approach is related only with the fault-location process. Unless
otherwise specified, all of the loads were modeled as constant
impedances (in ATP simulations as well as in the proposed
method).

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Fig. 3. Distribution test feeder used for evaluating the fault-location algorithm (data are given in Appendix B).

The faults were applied at each bus of the circuit, and the
errors were calculated and grouped into classes, in order to simplify the results analyses. These error classes were divided from
0 to 400 m into intervals of 100 m, resulting in four classes. In
addition, if the distance error is higher than 400 m, it is considered that the method has failed to locate the fault region.

NUMBER

OF

TABLE I
BUSES WITHIN EACH ERROR CLASS WITHOUT
CONSIDERING OUTAGE MAPPING

A. Results Without Outage Mapping

The results of the proposed method without the usage of
outage mapping are presented in Table I. Single-phase and
three-phase faults were considered, assuming fault resistance
values of 0.5 and 10.0 . The results show how many
faulted buses could be grouped within each error class. For
instance, in case of three-phase faults with a fault resistance
of 0.5 , 82 buses selected as the buses under faulted ones
were located within distance errors from 0 to 100 m, 38 buses
were located from 100 to 200 m, 12 buses were located from
200 to 300 m, and only 1 bus was located with a distance error
higher than 400 m. Moreover, the method has shown good
performance since most of the errors are concentrated in the
range from 0 to 100 m.
B. Results With Outage Mapping
The same cases presented in the previous subsection were analyzed in this subsection taking into consideration the outage
mapping. As a result, the search space was reduced, decreasing
the computing demand and also the chances of multiple estimation. For example, without using outage mapping, for a
three-phase fault at bus 40 (Fig. 3), the algorithm indicates the

TABLE II
NUMBER OF BUSES WITHIN EACH ERROR
CLASS CONSIDERING OUTAGE MAPPING

bus 36 (120 m of distance from bus 40), while when outage mapping is considered, bus 40 was indicated correctly as the faulted
bus. This happens because the search space is reduced to buses
40 to 45. The analysis of the results in Table II allows concluding
that the results can be improved by using outage mapping.
In the next section, the fault-location method robustness will
be assessed by running several sensitivity studies. Unless otherwise specified, all the results are obtained using outage mapping
and considering a fault resistance of 10.0 as the base case.

TRINDADE et al.: FAULT LOCATION IN DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

255

TABLE III
IMPACT OF LOAD VALUE ESTIMATION ERRORS

TABLE IV
IMPACT OF FAULT RESISTANCE VARIATION

IV. SENSITIVITY STUDIES

TABLE V
IMPACT OF MEASUREMENT ERRORS

In this section several parameters and conditions were varied

to further evaluate the proposed method. The sensitivity studies
took into consideration: load estimation uncertainties, fault resistance, voltage measurement accuracy, quantity and location
of feeder meters.
A. Load Estimation Accuracy
In the proposed method, the loads represented by constant
impedances are considered to build the bus impedance matrix.
Therefore, it is necessary to assess the influence of the load estimation accuracy on the method performance. To reach such a
goal, all the loads represented in the bus impedance matrix were
simultaneously varied in the same proportion to simulate errors
in the load estimation. The real load impedance was used in ATP
simulations
, and this was the benchmark case. Then, in
the proposed method, the load impedances were varied by a load
factor
, which assumed the following values: 80,
95, 105, and 120% of error on the load value for all loads. The
results are presented in Table III. By comparing Tables III and
II, it can be concluded that errors in load estimation do not have
a major impact on the method performance.

C. Voltage Measurement Accuracy

hand, bad calibration can cause higher errors in a few devices.

Thus, three cases were defined in order to study the impact
of measurement errors in the proposed fault-location method.
These cases are described below and the results are presented in
Table V.
Case 1) addition of random noise (errors) to all measurements. Since the noise addition is a random process,
it is not possible to affirm that the presented result
is unique. The noise is applied as follows. For each
measured value, a random value
is generated
following a normal distribution with mean equal to
zero and standard deviation of 0.5%. Then, the measured voltage value is multiplied by
;
Case 2) same situation of Case 1), but also considering that
the voltage deviations measured by the feeder meters at buses 20 and 100 are multiplied by a factor of
1.15, simulating bad calibration situations;
Case 3) same situation of Case 1), but also considering that
the voltage deviations measured by the feeder meters at buses 20 and 100 are multiplied by a factor of
0.85, simulating bad calibration situations;

Measurement errors may degrade the quality of the fault current estimation. Therefore it is necessary to analyze the method
sensitivity to inaccuracies in voltage measurements. Errors can
be caused by measurement noise or measurement device inaccuracy, and in this case the deviations are relatively small, lower
than 1%, but likely to occur in all measurements. On the other

By comparing Tables V and II (ideal condition without measurement errors), it is possible to conclude that errors in voltage
measurement can decrease the method performance. However,
the results are still acceptable since for most of the presented
cases, the buses were located with distance errors equal or lower

B. Fault Resistance
Typically, fault-location methods are affected by the fault
resistance, which influences the fault current value. In order
to determine this influence on the proposed method, Table IV
presents the results considering different fault resistance values.
For the fault resistance values tested in this paper, it can be observed that the proposed method performance is not deeply affected by the range of fault resistance values. Therefore, fault
resistance uncertainty does not have a deep impact on method
accuracy.

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TABLE VI
IMPACT OF DIFFERENT QUANTITIES OF VOLTAGE MEASUREMENTS

than 400 m. As a result, it must be pointed out that: the more accurate the voltage measurements, the better the method performance. This finding can be used to support the definition of the
technical requirements of smart feeder meters and their communication system infrastructure.
D. Feeder Meters Quantity and Location
All of the previous results had considered that voltage measurements were available from feeder meters installed in 13 out
of the 134 buses of the distribution system (i.e., about 10% of
the total number of buses). The feeder meters quantity and location were chosen without previous studies.
Since the proposed formulation is dedicated to the fault location through voltage measurements, it is reasonable to conclude
that if more feeder meters are installed, more accurate results
can be achieved. On the other hand, it is necessary to consider
that the costs and the amount of data grow if the quantity of
measurements increases.
In this context, the method performance was assessed by
using 10 and 5 feeder meters in the system of Fig. 3. For the
case with 10 feeder meters, their respective locations are buses:
3, 20, 30, 60, 100, 111, 118, 127, 129, and 134; and for the case
with five buses, they are: 3, 30, 100, 129, and 134. The results
are presented in Table VI, where 13 feeder meters refer to the
base case (Section III-B). It can be observed that the use of 5 m
did not degrade the quality of the solution significantly, since
most of the buses were located with distance errors lower than
100 m. Therefore, the method is robust enough to cope with a
reduced number of meters. This is an important characteristic
since economical factors may limit the installation of feeder
meters with voltage sag monitoring capability in distribution
systems.
The influence of the feeder meters placement was analyzed
as well. The results for three scenarios considering different locations of 10 feeder meters are shown in Table VII. These scenarios are arbitrarily divided in:
Case 1) feeder meters installed at buses 3, 20, 30, 60, 100,
111, 118, 127, 129, and 134;
Case 2) feeder meters installed at buses 15, 25, 44, 56, 66, 85,
89, 102, 112, and 131;
Case 3) feeder meters installed at buses 7, 36, 47, 66, 76, 84,
91, 104, 112, and 125.

TABLE VII
IMPACT OF FEEDER METERS ALLOCATION

It is possible to observe that the allocation of the meters has

an impact on the method performance; however, the performance is still acceptable. By analyzing the feeder meters location, preliminarily, one can conclude that when the voltage
measurements are obtained at buses located at the end of the
branches, such as in Case 1, the method presents better performance than when they are located in the main feeder and some
main branches. Although it was not possible to find an analytical explanation for this, when the meters are located at the end
of the branches, the voltage magnitude sensed by the meter is
affected by the higher number of fault occurrences at different
points of the system, since these faults will occur upstream from
the meter location. Thus, the method will be sensitive to a higher
number of fault locations.
V. METHOD PERFORMANCE USING VOLTAGE
PHASOR MEASUREMENTS
The results presented in the previous sections have considered only the usage of voltage magnitude values to process the
calculations in the proposed fault-location method. The results
have shown that the proposed method has good performance
even without information about the phase angles. Smart meters
capable of measuring voltage magnitude and phase angle are
more complex and expensive due to the need for synchronization. However, in the future, this can be more common; thus, in
this section, it is evaluated how the usage of angle information
can improve method performance.
Therefore, considering that the feeder meters are capable of
dealing with voltage phasors (magnitude and angle), instead of
only magnitude, this section presents the performance of the
proposed method considering such characteristics. The results
are presented in Table VIII, where it can be observed that
the algorithm performance was improved in comparison with
Table II. Moreover, the performance was not affected by the
different fault resistances: 0.5, 5.0, 10.0, 50.0, and 100.0 .
In this scenario, the immunity against fault resistance values
represents an important advantage of the proposed method. It
happens because all of the indices vary with fault resistance
practically with the same proportion. For instance, for a fault
at bus 5 (Fig. 3), the values of
for buses 1 to 10 are shown
in Fig. 4 considering different fault resistance values. It can be

TRINDADE et al.: FAULT LOCATION IN DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

TABLE VIII
IMPACT OF VOLTAGE MAGNITUDE AND ANGLE MEASUREMENTS

Note: in this table, the results were the same for all of the tested fault
resistances.

257

TABLE X
NUMBER OF BUSES WITHIN EACH ERROR CLASS, CONSIDERING OUTAGE
MAPPINGMOTOR LOAD OF 100 HP

TABLE XI
NUMBER OF BUSES WITHIN EACH ERROR CLASS, CONSIDERING OUTAGE
MAPPINGMOTOR LOAD OF 200 HP

TABLE XII
NUMBER OF BUSES WITHIN EACH ERROR CLASS, CONSIDERING OUTAGE
MAPPINGMOTOR LOAD OF 100 HPPHASOR MEASUREMENTS

Fig. 4. Values of the indices

resistances.

for a short circuit in bus 5 and different fault

TABLE IX
IMPACT OF ERRORS IN PHASOR MEASUREMENTS

observed that they change in the same proportion from one bus
to another and, as a result, the minimum is always associated
with the same bus.
A. Sensibility to Voltage Measurement Accuracy
The results from Section IV show that one of the main factors affecting the method performance is the accuracy of voltage
measurement. Therefore, Table IX presents the results considering voltage phasor measurements with outage mapping and
random noise (errors) in addition to all measurements according
to Case 1, as described in Section IV-C. In addition, the random
noises were included simultaneously in the voltage magnitude
and angle. Again, one can see this is an important factor affecting the method performance, but by comparing Tables V
with IX, it can be stressed that the method accuracy has been
improved significantly when angle measurements are considered, even in the presence of measurement errors.

VI. METHOD PERFORMANCE CONSIDERING DYNAMIC LOADS

Since all the loads are represented by the constant impedance
model, in this section, the method performance was studied considering the presence of an induction motor connected to bus
30. Table X shows the results for an induction motor of 100
HP and Table XI shows the results for an induction motor of
200 HP. Both set of results use voltage magnitude measurement.
Table XII shows the results for an induction motor of 100 HP
connected at bus 30 exploring phasor measurements. The results
in this section show that the method performance is good even
in the presence of dynamic loads.
VII. DISCUSSIONS
In the Introduction, several methods of fault location based
on automated metering systems were mentioned. They can be
grouped into three main classes: 1) methods based on outage
mapping; 2) methods based on voltage sag source detection;
and 3) methods based on measurements at the substation and
along the feeder. The methods presented in [12][14] and the
method proposed in this paper can be classified as 3) methods
based on measurements at the substation and along the feeder.
Thus, in this section, a short discussion is presented to compare
the proposed method with the previous ones.
For the proposed method, once the impedance matrix of the
system is built, the computational effort is considerably lower
than the method proposed in [12] since the proposed method

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is not iterative. Both methods require system parameters; however, the method proposed in [12] runs several load flows while
the proposed one applies a simple equation. On the other hand,
the advantage of the method proposed in [12] is that typically
fewer meters are needed.
The fault-location method from [13] uses voltage phasors
from sparse measurements along the feeder to locate the fault
in distribution systems. The fault-location process explores a
short-circuit program, a technique for fault resistance estimation and another for load estimation. According to the authors,
the method can precisely indicate the fault location and does
not suffer from multiple fault-location estimation imprecision.
Since this method needs a stage for the estimation of fault resistance before its application, it is expected that the computational
effort be higher and that the fault resistance values have more
influence on the results than the proposed method. In addition,
the method presented in [13] demands the usage of global positioning system (GPS) information, which is not typically available in distribution systems.
Finally, the method from [14] uses a formulation similar to
the method proposed here; however, in [14], estimating the fault
current by measuring all of the phasors of the currents injected in
the system (substation and distributed generation, for example)
is proposed and the total sum of the measured currents is assumed to be the fault current. After the estimation of the fault
current value, the voltage deviation measured is compared to the
calculated voltage deviation. The disadvantage of this method is
that it needs synchronized measurements of voltage and current
phasors at every distributed generator and substation, increasing
the costs and complexities.
VIII. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the voltage measurement capability of feeder
meters and the system bus impedance matrix were used to develop a robust fault-location method. The main findings of this
research are summarized as follows.
If feeder meters with voltage sag measurement capability
are available, the proposed fault-location method can be
easily applied due to its simplicity, increasing the aggregated value of such devices.
The results have shown that the method is robust since
it presented good performance when several parameters
were varied, even for different fault resistance values.
Automated outage mapping can improve the method performance by reducing the search space and the possibility
of multiple estimation.

Fig. 5. Example of the distribution system without representing the loads.

The sensitivity studies showed that the method performance was satisfactory even with a reduced number of
meters. This is an important finding since it may not be
economically feasible to install many feeder meters in the
distribution system.
Some topics related to the proposed method require further
investigation, such as the possibility of optimal placement of the
feeder meters dedicated to the proposed fault-location method,
and the possibility of considering distributed generators, based
on their representation in the bus impedance matrix.
APPENDIX A
Different from traditional short-circuit analysis, the proposed
fault-location method considers the loads in the construction of
the bus impedance matrix. If the load is ignored in the proposed
fault-location method, the fault-location index , calculated
for many different buses, could assume the same value. Consequently, it would be challenging to identify the faulted bus.
One illustrative example of this multiple estimation problem is
shown, based on a simple single-phase distribution system presented in Fig. 5.
The bus impedance matrix
, without considering the load
impedances of the circuit shown in Fig. 5 is given by the equation shown at the bottom of the page.
Considering the illustrative case with two feeder meters: one
at bus 3 and another at bus 5, and a fault at bus 1, the indices
and
are the same if the loads impedances are neglected,
as shown. Therefore, the algorithm would not be able to distinguish the actual bus under fault.
Following the proposed algorithm, the bus associated with
the minimum
is selected as the faulted bus. And
is given
by the total sum of
[as shown in (3)], where is associated
with the feeder meters and with the candidate bus. The indices
calculated using voltage measurements from the feeder meters
at buses 3 and 5 for a short circuit at buses 1 and 2 (not simultaneously) are given by the following equations of and .

TRINDADE et al.: FAULT LOCATION IN DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

TABLE XIII
TEST SYSTEM DATA

259

TABLE XIII
(Continued.)

First, for bus 1 and exploring the measurements from smart

feeder meters 3 and 5

Then, for bus 2 and feeder meters 3 and 5

The indices
and
have the same value, consequently
yielding multiple identification. However, in the proposed faultlocation method, the inclusion of loads in the bus impedance
matrix turns possible to distinguish between both buses, as the
elements in the matrix become different from each other. However, it is important to mention that accurate information about
the load is not necessary as discussed in Section IV-A.
APPENDIX B
The different conductor types of the system in Fig. 3 were
represented by different colors. The impedance associated
with each conductor type is presented and
is the
impedance of the external Thevenin equivalent connected to
bus 1, as shown in the equation at the bottom of the next page.
The test system data are presented in Table XIII, where and
represent the initial and final bus of each branch, respectively,

260

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 29, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014

and the loads are always connected to the final bus and the loads
power factor is 0.92.
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Fernanda C. L. Trindade (S09) received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil, in 2009, where she
is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering.
Her research interests are power system automation, monitoring, and
protection.

Walmir Freitas (M02) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from
the University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil, in 2001.
Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the University of Campinas,
Campinas, Brazil. His research interests are the analysis of distribution systems,
distributed generation, and power quality.

Jos C. M. Vieira (S98M07) received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil, in 1999
and 2006, respectively.
Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the So Carlos School of Engineering, So Carlos, Brazil. His research interests are distributed generation,
power system control, dynamics, and protection.