Correlation based fault management for centralized protection and control

Fault management of the distribution network is today predominantly based on single point measurements, which are processed in bay level protection and control relays. This paradigm is now changing, due to the introduction on the market of centralized protection and control platforms, which are capable of receiving multiple separate digital measurement streams. This paper presents a new analysis method for substation measurements, where station level correlation coefficients are used for fault management. The proposed method can be used both for post-mortem analysis, as well as for real-time protection. The method has been tested and verified with real live data, gathered over a period of 1.5 years from a pilot substation utilizing a centralized protection and control solution. The main benefits of the proposed methods are simplification of the engineering process via a reduction of individual function instances and faster operation due to the availability of subcycle signal processing. In addition, a new digital finger-print for network events is proposed, that can be further utilized in other data driven applications.