Microgrid fault detection methods: Reviews, issues and future trends

Globally, microgrid (MG) technologies have become an important paradigm for integrating distributed resources (DR) into power systems. Growing cost, burdens associated with transmission and distribution infrastructure, and the environmental issues associated with combustion of fossil fuels, has attracted MG to provide electricity to various categories of customers. Despite the advantages, numerous challenges are still hindering the operation of MG working in harmony with conventional power system such as voltage and frequency control, optimization of distributed generation systems, islanding detection, power quality, etc. Another such technical challenge is MG fault detection, which must act in response to both the utility grid and the MG faults, for the proper functioning of the system. So, the idea of this paper is to provide a critical review of various fault detection techniques, and to categorize them based on the model based and data-driven based methods. It is also hoped that this work will provide some future directions for the researchers in discovering relevant references, and designing appropriate detection techniques.