VeHIF: An Accessible Vegetation High-Impedance Fault Data Set Format

TL;DR

This paper introduces a standardized, accessible data format for a large, real-world vegetation high-impedance fault dataset, facilitating improved research and benchmarking in power system fault detection.

Contribution

It proposes a new HDF5-based format for a publicly available high-impedance fault dataset, enhancing accessibility and usability for researchers.

Findings

The dataset contains over 900 recorded faults.

The format improves accessibility across multiple programming languages.

Tools for data visualization and compilation are provided.

Abstract

High-impedance faults are a challenging problem in power distribution systems. They often do not trigger protection devices and can result in serious hazards such as igniting fires when in contact with vegetation. The current research field dedicated to studying these faults is extensive but suffers from a constraining bottleneck of a lack of real experimental data. Many works set to detect and localize such faults rely on high-impedance fault low-fidelity models, and the lack of public data sets makes it impractical to have objective performance benchmarks. This letter describes and proposes a format for a data set of more than 900 vegetation high-impedance faults funded by the Victorian Government in Australia recorded in high-sampling resolution. The original data set is public, but it was made available through an obscure format that limits its accessibility. The presented format in this letter uses the standard hierarchical data format (HDF5), which makes it easily accessible in many languages such as MATLAB, Python, C++, and more. The data set compiler and visualizer script are also provided in the work repository.