Optimal Placement and Sizing of Fault Current Limiters in Power Systems with Uncertainties

Fault current limiters (FCLs) have gained much more attention recently because of large possible short circuit currents. On the other hand, power systems encounter so many uncertainties with presence of distributed generations, stochastic loads and random outages of all system elements. In this paper, FCLs are subjected to power systems with uncertainties which have not been considered in last researches. The purpose of this work is to present an approach in order to determine the possible locations and sizes of FCLs in a network with probabilistic behavior. In the proposed method, a Monte-Carlo Simulation (MCS) based approach, which has the ability to consider all uncertainties, is employed to search for the best location of FCLs so as to meet the specific requirements. In the next step, a novel objective function is defined and appropriate sizes of the FCLs are determined. The suggested objective function is optimized using the gravitational search algorithm (GSA). The proposed method is applied on different systems including IEEE 9-bus and 14-bus system in MATLAB software environment. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method.