Intelligent Fault Location Algorithms for Distributed Generation Distribution Networks: A Review

Distributed Generation (DG) is a small-scale technology linked to consumers through the distribution system and has a high potential for technical, economic, and environmental benefits. The incorporation of generation at demand points produces a variety of load flow and fault currents, changing unidirectional flows to bidirectional structures and altering the characteristics of fault currents. The traditional methods for fault location that are implemented correspond to the traveling wave method and the impedance method. DG inclusion establishes new challenges, so it is necessary to propose or adopt models that improve the location process. During the last years, several Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been introduced, where it presents good results due to its high performance and capacity to provide a fast response. This paper reviews AI-based techniques for fault location in distribution networks with DG. Although the advances are promising, many questions still need to be answered: the permanent work is to identify the advances in AI to obtain better results. Additionally, the implemented strategies must be scalable to ease the computational load and to be able to solve problems of greater complexity.