The paper proposes a cuckoo optimization algorithm (COA) based method for fault location estimation in transmission lines. COA is a novel evolutionary algorithm, suitable for continuous nonlinear optimization problems. By the use of the introduced algorithm, fault location estimation is precisely done in the case of many false alarms. Failure performance of circuit breakers and relays or multiple simultaneous faults are also handled using the proposed method. By implementing the algorithm to large-scale power systems, we observed that faulty sections are rapidly estimated. The effectiveness of COA is confirmed by applying the algorithm to a real Brazilian power system. The simulation results are compared with several methods in the literature, namely, Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Conventional Particle Swarm Optimization (CPSO), Type1 Particle Swarm Optimization (T1PSO) which is an altered version of PSO, and Differential Evolution (DE). The superiority of the proposed method compared to other methods is verified

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