A novel graph search and machine learning method to detect and locate high impedance fault zone in distribution system

High impedance fault (HIF) is difficult to detect by conventional overcurrent protection relays due to the lower fault current values, which are normally lower than the normal current. A fast and reliable algorithm is required to detect this type of fault. This paper proposes a novel method for detecting the location of HIF fault zone in a distribution system by using a novel graph theory-based zone detection technique along with a Random Search Multilevel Support Vector Machine (RSMSVM) algorithm to classify the faulted zone. Due to shift in-variance property of "Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DTCWT)," which has been used, in this paper, to decompose the voltage/current waveform to collect the signature of the signals and feed to the optimized RSMSVM model for classifying fault zone. The proposed method is evaluated on the IEEE 33-bus system and also IEEE 39 bus test system under normal and noisy conditions. The proposed method is also evaluated for distribution network with the integration of distributed generation.