Abstract
The overcurrent protection relays are a main component of the power system protection. The design of the protection scheme has to ensure the capability of relays to detect the faulty condition and trip the suitable circuit breaker to disconnect only the faulty part of the network without any effect on the healthy loads in the network. The coordination between OCRs may be affected by the penetration of the distributed generation units to the conventional network. This is due to the variable topology nature of networks with multiple feeding sources, which leads to variable network impedances, variable power flow and variable fault current levels. In this paper, a design of an optimized adaptive overcurrent protection scheme is done for an industrial microgrid with distributed generation. The setting of the relays are selected according to a study of the network operation topologies using ETAP software, and the protection setting of relays is optimized by genetic algorithm using MATLAB optimization toolbox to obtain the optimum coordination scheme.