Benchmarking Machine Learning Models for Fault Classification and Localization in Power System Protection
It addresses critical protection challenges for power grid operators, but is incremental as it benchmarks existing methods on new data.
This paper tackled the problem of fault classification and localization in power systems with increasing renewable integration by benchmarking classical machine learning models, achieving an F1 score of 0.992 for classification and an R2 of 0.806 for localization with a mean processing time of 0.563 ms.
The increasing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs), particularly renewables, poses significant challenges for power system protection, with fault classification (FC) and fault localization (FL) being among the most critical tasks. Conventional protection schemes, based on fixed thresholds, cannot reliably identify and localize short circuits with the increasing complexity of the grid under dynamic conditions. Machine learning (ML) offers a promising alternative; however, systematic benchmarks across models and settings remain limited. This work presents, for the first time, a comparative benchmarking study of classical ML models for FC and FL in power system protection based on EMT data. Using voltage and current waveforms segmented into sliding windows of 10 ms to 50 ms, we evaluate models under realistic real-time constraints. Performance is assessed in terms of accuracy, robustness to window size, and runtime efficiency. The best-performing FC model achieved an F1 score of 0.992$\pm$0.001, while the top FL model reached an R2 of 0.806$\pm$0.008 with a mean processing time of 0.563 ms.