Wide area or regional protection is a feasible path to solve the performance problem of relay protection, especially backup protection in a complex large power grid, and is a reasonable trend of power system protection technology in the smart grid age. By utilizing regional grid information and intelligent techniques, regional intelligent protection systems work with main protection systems coordinately, simplify backup protection systems and enhance the overall capability of power system relay protection. In this paper, the architectural design for a regional intelligent protection system with distributed centralized decision is discussed and the construction and regularization of the intelligent algorithm based on the genetic algorithm are studied with the consideration of the constraints of standardized communication zones. The simulation results have verified the validity of the proposed algorithm.