A binary coded brain storm optimization for fault section diagnosis of power systems

Fault section diagnosis (FSD) of power systems plays an important role in power system operation. In order to quickly and accurately diagnose the fault section or sections after the occurrence of an event, a novel variant of brain storm optimization (BSO) in objective space algorithm, referred to as BCBSO (binary coded BSO), is proposed in this paper. The FSD problem is transformed into a 0-1 integer programming problem. The difference between the reported alarms and the expected states of protective relays and circuit breakers is used as the objective function. In BCBSO, each population individual is directly encoded as a binary vector and thereby the transcoding process can be avoided when solving the 0-1 integer programming problem. In addition, logical operations instead of floating operations are employed for binary strings, making the evolutionary process more convenient. In order to verify the performance of BCBSO, three test systems, i.e., the typical 4-substation power system, IEEE 118-bus system, and a practical power grid in Jilin province of China with different fault scenarios including single fault and multiple faults with failed and/or malfunctioned protective devices are employed. Six popular metaheuristic methods including ABC, BBO, DE, GA, PSO, and BSO are utilized to validate the effectiveness of BCBSO. The experimental results comprehensively demonstrate the superiority of BCBSO in terms of successful rate, diagnosis error, robustness, computation efficiency, convergence speed, and statistics. In addition, the effect of population size is investigated as well.