This paper presents a practical and effective novel approach to curve fit electromechanical (EM) overcurrent (OC) relay characteristics. Based on singular value decomposition (SVD), the curves are fitted with equation in state space under modal coordinates. The relationships between transfer function and Markov parameters are adopted in this research to represent the characteristic curves of EM OC relays. This study applies the proposed method to two EM OC relays: the GE IAC51 relay with

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... ely inverse-time characteristic and the ABB CO-8 relay with inverse-time characteristic. The maximum absolute values of errors of hundreds of sample points taken from four time dial settings (TDS) for each relay between the actual characteristic curves and the corresponding values from the curve-fitting equations are within the range of 10 milliseconds. Finally, this study compares the SVD with the adaptive network and fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) to demonstrate its accuracy and identification robustness.