Electricity Theft Detection and Localization in Smart Grids for Industry 4.0

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is considered as the fourth revolution in industrial sector that represents the digitization of production process in a smarter way. Industry 4.0 refers to the intelligent networking of machines, their processes, and infrastructure, as well as the use of information and computer technology to transform industry. The technologies like industrial internet of things (IIoT), big data analytics, cloud computing, augmented reality and cyber security are the main pillars of industry 4.0. Industry 4.0, in particular, is strongly reliant on the IIoT that refers to the application of internet of things (IoT) in industrial sector like smart grids (SG). IoT can be deployed in different sections of smart grids that include electricity generation, transmission, distribution and its utilization at customer side. However, the key obstacles that deployment faces are theft detection and localization in smart grids. Electricity theft causes huge losses to the electricity providers and in turn contributes in increasing the fiscal deficit of the government. Therefore, this paper provides an IoT based solution that implements a system which automatically checks for electricity theft in between the regional transformer and customer side. The system also sends the latitude and longitude coordinates of the place where the theft has been detected on to the thingspeak cloud platform. Further, the exact location of the theft has been displayed on the webpage using geolocation application programing interface (API) on Google maps. The proposed system can be easily integrated in the smart grid network structure and helps companies to increase their business.