Fault Detection, Isolation, and Service Restoration in Distribution Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends

This paper surveys the conceptual aspects, as well as recent developments in fault detection, isolation, and service restoration (FDIR) following an outage in an electric distribution system. This paper starts with a discussion of the rationale for FDIR, and then investigates different areas of the FDIR problem. Recently reported approaches are compared and related to discussions on current practices. This paper then addresses some of the often-cited associated technical, environmental, and economic challenges of implementing self-healing for the distribution grid. The review concludes by pointing toward the need and directions for future research.