Transmission lines are one of the most important power system components, responsible for delivering

energy from generating plants to consumers. Those lines may present a high failure rate since, in most

cases, they cover large distances and are exposed to different climate conditions, so that transmission lines

are subjected to many kinds of faults. The principal types are phase-to-ground, double phase-to-ground,

phase-to-phase and three-phase with or without earth connection. Following the detection and

classification of the faults, the task of fault location is performed. Fault location plays a critical role in

transmission line protection. Accurate and fast fault location under a variety of fault conditions are

important requirements from the point of service restoration and reliability. Transmission line fault

location techniques can be classified into two main categories: techniques based on the fundamental

power frequency component, and techniques utilizing the higher frequency components of the fault

signals [1]. The latter are also referred to as traveling wave methods, due to their use of traveling wave

theory. Each of these two groups can be further divided into two subgroups: to use single-end information

or to use information from both ends of the faulted line. Algorithms that use measurements of current and

voltage at both terminals of the line are generally more accurate than the ones using data only from the

local terminal. However, in many transmission lines, a communication channel between the local and

remote line terminals is not available, thus making it necessary to use data from the local terminal only.

Fault location algorithms based on only local terminal current and voltage data need some simplifying

assumptions to make the fault distance calculation possible, affecting the accuracy of the results.

However, fault location techniques using single-ended data could be more attractive for researchers [2].

The distance protection method is one of the most used techniques for preventing damages that can be

inflicted to transmission lines. The conventional distance protection is based on impedance measurement

elements that estimate the line impedance from the relay to the fault point using voltage and current

phasor quantities [3, 4]. The ANN (artificial neural networks) based algorithms have been developed as

an alternative to conventional methods, since they present very promising results with regard to precision

and operating time. The applications of neural networks based fault location techniques to overhead line

are available in many papers. Refs. [5, 6] present ANN-based algorithms that act as classifiers, indicating
whether the fault is located inside or outside the protection zones. Refs. [7-9] present ANN-based

algorithms that act as function approximators which point out, directly or not, the fault distance. The

motivation for investigating the potential of ANN is based on the fact that ANN possesses excellent noise

immunity, robustness, fault tolerance, and generalization capabilities. Some of the published results of the

application of ANNs in distance protection are related to the improvements in distance relaying. In Ref.

[10], the classification and location tasks are accomplished by using fuzzy neural network. But this

approach is affected by the amount of computation which needs extraction of DC component from

sampled signals in addition to peaks of fundamental voltage and current waveforms. Ref. [8] describes an

artificial neural networks-based fault locator for EHV (extra high voltage) transmission lines to classify

the types of faults and locate the fault position on the line. Ref. [9] presents an ANN-based application to

select the best ANN structures for fault location in transmission lines. The technique uses RBF (radial

basis function) neural networks. The maximum error of proposed algorithm is 0.5%. Refs. [11, 12]

introduce an ANN based methodology for protecting transmission lines by detecting faults in zone 1 only,

i.e., 80% of the transmission line. The approach should differentiate only faults within 80% of the line

length from faults outside that zone, giving 1 and 0, respectively. Ref. [13] uses a fault-location module

for fault diagnosis, which incorporates a two-stage adaptive structure neural network, carries out the

function of fault location to identify if the fault location is within the protected section with averaged

fault-location errr of 0.41%-0.54%. Ref. [14] presents the development of an artificial neural network

based algorithm for transmission lines distance protection with any transmission line regardless of its

configuration or voltage level. However, the conventional Fourier algorithm presents better performance

than the ANN-based algorithm for 500 kV and 765 kV lines, with regards to the settling times. Recently,

in Ref. [15], an ANN-based algorithm for the single ended fault locator is proposed based on the

Levenberg-Marquardt optimization technique. The error of proposed algorithm is kept below 0.65%.

However, almost all the studies have so far employed the FNN trained with back-propagation algorithm

(BPNN) which has a better structure and been widely used. But there are still many drawbacks if we

simply use feed-forward neural network, such as slow training rate, easy to trap into local minimum point,
and bad ability on global search. Then the PSO (particle swarm optimization) algorithm can exactly be

used to fill up those gaps. In this paper, FNN trained by PSO algorithm is proposed for fault location

scheme in 500 kV transmission system with distributed parameters presentation. The purpose is to

simulate distance protection relay. The algorithm acts as classifier which requires phasor measurements

data from one end of the transmission line and DFT (discrete Fourier transform). Extensive simulation

studies carried out using MATLAB show that the proposed scheme has the ability to give a good

estimation of fault location under various fault conditions.