An Approach to Tackle the Threat of Sympathy Trips in Directional Overcurrent Relay Coordination

This paper proposes to introduce additional constraints in the directional overcurrent relay coordination problem to tackle the sympathy trips. This paper attempts to tackle the sympathy trips in which other relay(s) in the system operate(s) earlier in the designated primary relay. The solution to this problem requires the inclusion of some additional constraints, making the coordination problem too complex. This paper proposes to solve the problem in two phases. In the first phase, the problem is solved by a normal coordination procedure and sympathy trips are identified. In the second phase, the proposed additional constraints are imposed only for the sympathy trips identified in the first phase. For the second phase, three approaches for including additional constraints were investigated. This paper includes results of the proposed algorithm for the IEEE 30-bus system. The results amply suggest that one of the three approaches of including additional constraints successfully tackled the problem of sympathy trip