INNOVATIONS AND APPLICATIONS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING, Assoc. Prof. Mohammed Wadi,Asst. Prof. Mohammed Salemdeeb,Asst. Prof. Mohammed Jouda, Editör, Livre De Lyon, Lyon, ss.203-232, 2025
Nowadays, electricity distribution networks tend to grow with the
increasing the energy demand. Thus, the number of distributed
generation sources (DGR) in electricity distribution networks is
increasing in order to meet the energy demand. DGRs are known as Renewable
Energy Sources (RES) with intermittent operation nature such as wind energy
(Wadi et al., 2023), solar energy (Wadi, Jouda, et al., 2024), fuel cells, battery
storage systems and other sources. Today, as the number and size of these
distributed generation sources increase, electricity distribution networks are
evolving to become more reliable and sustainable. Integrating DGRs into
distribution networks (DGRs) reduces the dependence of loads on long
distantance generation sources and helps to minimize transmission losses by
reducing the activity of transmission systems. However, DGRs cause some
technical problems in addition to the advantages they provide to transmission
and distribution systems. These technical problems are; power quality problems
(Razmi et al., 2023), adverse load flow (Roy & Pota, 2015), technical losses,
grid stability and reliability problems (Ndawula et al., 2019) and protection
system difficulties (El Idrissi et al., 2021) stand out. As focused on in this
chapter, the difficulties experienced in the protection system of the distribution
network with the increase in DGRs; Reverse Power Flow (RPF), increase in
short-circuit currents (Meskin et al., 2020), bi-directional power flow (Alcala-
Gonzalez et al., 2022), fault impedance and protection blindness (Tariq et al.,
2021) and impairment of protection coordination (Yousaf et al., 2021). In
particular, with the increase in distributed energy resources, protection
coordination structures in electrical grids are becoming invalid.
In order to emphasize the importance of protection coordination, it is
necessary to mention the necessity of protection system in the electrical network,
its existence is inevitable to ensure human and equipment safety and to continue
service continuity. Therefore, the existence of protection systems and the
calculation of proper protection settings are seen as a necessity. Therefore, the
need for new protection strategies is increasing (Ilik & Arsoy, 2017). In cases
where the loads in the distribution network are fed by more than one DGR,
protection coordination problems arise in classical protection methods since the
load flow and short circuit characteristics of the Distribution Network (DN)
change. Therefore, the existence of a dynamic protection system that will
quickly solve the protection coordination problems becomes a requirement. This
protection system should react selectively, quickly, reliably, economically and
determinedly in case of possible short circuit faults of the DN. At this point, the
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dynamic protection coordination system in distribution networks should work
under realistic constraints for proper protection configurations in cases where
protection coordination is disrupted. The use of adaptive protection philosophy,
which continues to be popular among dynamic protection systems today, is
important in line with these needs (Chandraratne et al., 2018). Adaptive
protection systems may have a complex structure depending on the network
structure, the number of DGRs, the size of the DGRs, the number of loads and
the size of the loads. Based on this, protection coordination in radial DN is
simple. Because, the load flow and short-circuit fault currents are unidirectional.
However, with the increase in the number of DGRs in the distribution network,
the load flow becomes bidirectional. Therefore, the increase in the number of
sources at different locations makes the short-circuit fault current bidirectional
(Huchel & Zeineldin, 2016). The protection of the network against bidirectional
fault currents is provided by directional overcurrent relays that can detect the
fault direction (Ataei et al., 2021)(A. Shobole et al., 2018).