Power transmission lines of traditional power transmission systems (PTSs) may suffer from some faults that can lead to blackouts. This work proposes a methodology to construct hierarchical distributed control systems (DCSs) for the automatic fault detection and restoration of PTSs using colored Petri nets (CPNs). If faults occur in power transmission lines, they can be detected by supervisors, and local solutions can be computed to restore the faults. Each supervisor is coordinated by a coordination protocol to perform the computation of local solutions. The structures of traditional PTSs are simplified and defined by CPNs, and the derivation processes of fault detection and restoration based on the proposed coordination protocol are verified by the mathematical methods of CPNs. Finally, the complexity of the proposed hierarchical DCS and coordination protocol is discussed and an example is given to illustrate the proposed method. © 2018 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.