Overcoming limitations of the present protection technology for smart grid: Innovative approaches to detect High Impedance Faults

This paper arises in the context of modernizing the power system by making it more intelligent and reliable. It tackles one of the limitations of the conventional protection technology: High Impedance Fault (HIF) detection in multi-grounded distribution networks. Two innovative approaches recently developed are described and compared. These approaches incorporate prior knowledge of the fault and advance techniques of computing science into the development of protection functions. Besides presenting an efficient solution to the HIF detection, they provide guidelines to deal with complex faults and develop a new generation of detection functions.