Review of Non-Technical Losses Identification Techniques

Abstract

Illegally consumption of electric power, termed as non-technical losses for the distribution companies is one of the dominant factors all over the world for many years. Although there are some conventional methods to identify these irregularities, such as physical inspection of meters at the consumer premises etc, but it requires large number of manpower and time; then also it does not seem to be adequate. Now a days there are various methods and algorithms have been developed that are proposed in different research papers, to detect non-technical losses. In this paper these methods are reviewed, their important features are highlighted and also the limitations are identified. Finally, the qualitative comparison of various non-technical losses identification algorithms is presented based on their performance, costs, data handling, quality control and execution times. It can be concluded that the graph-based classifier, Optimum-Path Forest algorithm that have both supervised and unsupervised variants, yields the most accurate result to detect non-technical losses.