Fault management in electrical distribution networks

The management of electricity distribution has to cope with rapid changes in the business environment, due to the liberalization in the electrical energy market. The main goal for the utilities is to reduce their operating costs to get ahead of the competition. One popular strategy is to increase the degree of automation of the network control system. The handling of network failures (e.g. short circuits, earth faults) offers a lot of possibilities for automation. The main tasks are fault localization, fault isolation and system restoration. The network operator needs excellent knowledge about the controlled network area to perform these tasks efficiently. Without efficient aids by automation, the operator has to achieve and to keep these skills by spending a lot of time with a dispatcher training simulator. In this paper a fault management system is described which automates the fault localization and the determination of isolation and restoration measures to relieve the operator from these demanding tasks during network failures