This paper presents a fully automated methodology for the coordination of the protection system of a system-wide power network. The introduced metaheuristic is capable of handling different protection schemes and complex network structures. A metaheuristic consists of three basic elements: mathematical representation of the problem, a fitness function and the optimization algorithm. A new variant of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is presented to solve this challenge as well as possible. This paper makes use of previously published works and focuses on the optimization algorithm. Nevertheless the method was applied to a real transmission network. The results are discussed and rated and the effectiveness is pinpointed.