Substation automation for replacing faulted CTs in distribution feeders

Abstract

Current transformers (CTs) are one of the key constituents of power system instrumentation and measurement, and their failure may lead to a breakdown of the entire protection scheme. The CT replacement or repair may not be feasible every time a CT malfunctions at a remote distribution substation as rural areas generally lack adequate skilled manpower. This paper presents a multi-agent system based substation automation solution to improve the reliability of protection system during any CT failure. It employs a special function protection scheme for making quick replacements of faulted CTs associated with current differential relay (87). The proposed autonomous protection scheme has been tested on a typical American Electric Power (AEP) distribution substation using MATLAB/Simulink and Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE).