The 79th Annual Georgia Tech Protective Relaying Conference will be held from 15 to 17 April 2026 at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Recognized as one of the premier technical forums dedicated to power system protection, the conference will bring together protection engineers, utility specialists, manufacturers, consultants, researchers, and academics to discuss the latest developments in protective relaying and power system automation.
The conference opened with welcoming remarks by Professor Sakis Meliopoulos of Georgia Tech, followed by the keynote address by Mark Adamiak, Professor of Practice at George Mason University. The three-day technical program featured parallel paper sessions covering transmission and distribution protection, digital substations, inverter-based resources (IBRs), high-impedance fault detection, process bus applications, transformer and generator protection, communication-assisted protection, wildfire mitigation, and relay engineering.
A significant focus of this year’s event was the transformation of protection systems driven by digital technologies. Numerous papers addressed IEC 61850 process bus implementations, centralized protection, hardware-in-the-loop testing, digital substations, and the application of artificial intelligence to simplify engineering workflows.
The conference also included an extensive vendor exhibition that remained open throughout the event. The conference continued its long tradition of promoting innovation, knowledge exchange, and best practices in power system protection and control.
The final day featured a student paper presentation and the traditional Real World Experiences session, where the participants shared lessons learned from actual protection system events.
