109
2019 IEEE International Conference on Sustainable Energy Technologies and Systems(ICSETS)..............................................
A Novel Islanding Detection Method Based on
Transfer Learning Technique Using VGG16
Network
Santhosh K G Manikonda, Student Member, IEEE
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
National Institute of Technology Karnataka
Surathkal, India
santhosh.manikonda@gmail.com
Abstract—The escalating need for energy in the recent times
is unprecedented, which is driving the penetration of renewable
energy sources in distribution system in a big way. The growing
number of renewable sources in a system has made the control,
operation and protection of the system very complex. Among
others, one of the key issues in seamless interconnection of
renewable energy sources to a system is islanding. This paper
proposes a new and efficient islanding detection method that
employs transfer learning based technique. The results show that
the proposed method can successfully classify islanding events
with a good accuracy.
Index Terms—Distributed Generation, Islanding Detection, Re-
newable Energy Sources, Machine Learning, Transfer Learning,
Classification
I. I NTRODUCTION
The power generation sources connected to the consumer
side of the grid, at the distribution network, for local pro-
duction and consumption are termed as distributed generation
(DG) sources. This scheme reduces the losses that would
otherwise occur in a conventional transmission network, where
the power generation sources are at a remote location. DG
is effective in terms of alleviating transmission losses, cost
of new system to transmit more power and also other com-
plexities related to long transmission networks. Also, DG can
be used as an emergency source at times of during natural
calamities or grid failure . On the other hand, DG also has
some limitations. The intermittent nature of the renewable
sources makes the control of power extremely difficult. In
addition to this, the conventional power network is designed
for unidirectional flow of power, meaning from power sources
to the distribution side. The introduction of DG sources in
a distribution network has given rise to problems that make
seamless integration of DG sources cumbersome. One of the
key problems that arise due to increased DG penetration is
islanding. Islanding is a phenomenon where a DG continues to
energize the local loads even when the power supply from the
utility grid is absent or discontinued. Islanding can either be
intentional or unintentional. Intentional islanding is a planned
event and necessary care is taken to avoid occurrence of
any problems. Unintentional islanding on the other hand is
978-1-5386-6971-6/19/ $31.00 ©2019 IEEE
Dattatraya N Gaonkar, Senior Member, IEEE
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
National Institute of Technology Karnataka
Surathkal, India
dngaonkar@nitk.ac.in
an unplanned event. This is a serious issue since it poses
a threat to both system and personnel [1]–[3]. Unintentional
islanding needs to be detected and necessary actions must be
taken. International standards, such as, IEEE 1547 dictates that
islanding event must be detected within 2 seconds.
Over the years, several islanding detection methods (IDMs)
have been reported in the literature. IDMs can be broadly
classified as passive [4]–[7], active [8]–[14], hybrid [15], [16],
signal processing (SP) based [17]–[21], and machine learning
(ML) based [22]–[26]. Passive methods basically monitor
the local parameters from point of common coupling (PCC).
Parameters, such as voltage, current, frequency, phase and total
harmonic distortion and so on, are passively measured and
compared with a threshold value to detect islanding. These
methods are very fast. However, passive methods require
threshold setting and it has a non-detection zone (NDZ), where
it fails to detect islanding. Active methods on the other hand,
inject a disturbance signal and check the response. Based
on the response an islanding event is detected. The problem
of NDZ is eliminated in this method. The issue with active
methods is that they introduce power quality problems in
the system. Hybrid methods have attempted to combine the
advantages of passive and active methods. Signal processing
techniques have the ability to extract hidden features from
the parameters that are extracted from PCC. This enables the
minimization of NDZ in passive techniques and makes them
effective. In addition, the use of ML based techniques have a
great impact on performance of IDMs.
In spite of all the advancements in IDMs, the increasing
complexity of the system along with upcoming trends, such
as smart grids, the need of the hour is to have intelligent
IDMs that can handle huge amounts of data effectively. This
paper proposes a new islanding detection method that uses
the concept of image classification based on transfer learning
technique to classify islanding and non-islanding events. This
approach has not been reported in the literature, to the best of
authors knowledge. The remainder of the paper is organized
as given below.
Section. II gives an account of the grid connected PV based
 
 110

Fig. 1. Schematic of the system used for implementing proposed method.

inverter system that is used for implementing the proposed

method. Section. III details the process of converting time-
series data to images and the data set generation. In Section. IV
a brief explanation about convolution neural networks (CNNs)
is presented. Section. V explains the method that uses the
generated data set and performs classification of islanding and
non-islanding events. Section. VI discusses the results obtained
using the proposed method. Lastly, Section. VII summarizes
the paper and potential of the proposed method in islanding
detection application.
Fig. 2. Scalogram image of the example equation.
II. S YSTEM DESCRIPTION
A 100kW grid-connected PV system is considered for
implementing the proposed technique. A schematic of the
system is shown in Fig.1. Voltages from the PCC are fed
to the algorithm for classifying islanding and non-islanding
events. The MATLAB/Simulink model of the system shown
in Fig.1 used for this work is based on [27]. This model has
been adapted to meet the requirements of this study. In the
simulations, an isladning event is created at a time instant of
0.4s and Va , Vb , Vc from point of common coupling (PCC) are
acquired for a total of 7 cycles at 1000 samples per second.
A computer with Intel Core i7 processor and 4GB RAM
running on Windows 8 operating system is used to carry out
the simulations.
III. DATA S ET G ENERATION
The proposed technique uses image classification as a means
to detect islanding. The process of converting time-series data,
that is acquired from the PPC, to images is presented here.
x(t) = 10sin(2π ∗ 20 ∗ t) + 20sin(2π ∗ 200 ∗ t) (1) Fig. 3. Scalogram images of concatenated voltage (V[abc] ) for grid connected
and islanded modes of operation.
A scalogram image is obtained by applying Continuous
wavelet transform (CWT) to a time-series data. A scalogram
is basically a visual representation of CWT with x and y axes and 200Hz, while the magnitudes are depicted in two different
representing time and frequency where as z-axis represents colors (blue for 10 and yellow for 20).
magnitude displayed in terms of color gradient. An example To generate the data set for islanding and non-islanding
of a scalogram image and its corresponding voltage signal are cases the following method is used. The three phase voltages,
shown in Fig.2. This scalogram image is obtained from time- Va , Vb and Vc from the PCC are acquired as a time-series data.
series data generated by (1) for a duration of 1sec. It represents These three voltages are concatenated together to represent
two signals of frequencies 20Hz and 200Hz with magnitudes the state of all three voltages in a single array as V[abc] .
10 and 20 respectively. The frequencies are arbitrarily chosen CWT is now applied to concatenated voltage V[abc] to generate
solely for demonstration purpose. It can be seen from the a scalogram image that has the information of all three
scalogram in Fig. 2, the two bars represents frequencies, 20Hz phases. The above process is now repeated for PCC voltages
 

TABLE I
VARIOUS CASES SIMULATED TO CREATE DATA SET
Events simulated Number of cases
Islanding: (Total 56)
Near Zero Mismatch loading 20
Light & medium load 36
Non-Islanding (Total 56)
Grid-connected 36
Sudden switching ON of L and C loads 10
Sudden switching OFF of L and C loads 10
Fig. 4. General architecture of a CNN.
that are acquired for different conditions. Several islanding
and non-islanding cases are simulated and scalogram images
are generated for each case. Fig.3 shows scalogram images
generated using concatenated voltage V[abc] for grid connected
and islanded modes of operation. Here, an islanding event is
created at 0.4sec. It can be clearly seen in Fig. 3 that there is
a clear distinction between islanded and grid connected mode
images. This indicates the potential of image classification
techniques as a candidate for islanding detection.
Since the detection of an islanding event is very difficult at
near zero power mismatch between the DG source generation
and the load, care has been taken to include plenty of cases
in this region. In case of grid connected mode of operation,
sudden switching (ON/OFF) of inductive or capacitive loads
are often misclassified as islanding events. Therefore, several
cases of sudden switching of inductive and capacitive loads
are also included. A total of 112 events are simulated for the
data set creation. These cases include, 56 islanding events and
56 non-islanding events. All the considered cases are tabulated
in Table I.
IV. C ONVOLUTION N EURAL N ETWORKS
Feature ”extraction is an important step when traditional ML
is used for image classification. In the training process features
are extracted to initially train the ML classifier. Later, when a
new image is given as an input for classification, again features
are extracted from the image and fed to the ML classifier for
classification. Contrary to traditional ML, a convolution neural
network (CNN) performs end to end learning, meaning, the
classifier learns both the features and classification directly
from the images.
A convolution neural network is quite similar to a Neural
Network (NN). The following are the similarities. Both NN
and CNNs have neurons as basic building blocks, biases and
111
Fig. 5. Convolution layer in a CNN.
learnable weights. Each neuron receives an input and a dot
product is performed. At the end, the entire network of NN
or CNN, has a single differentiable score as output. However,
CNNs or ConvNets are explicitly designed for images at the
input layer. These images are generally looked at as a 3D
volume. The width and height in pixels form a 2D plane while
the RGB values for each pixel form the depth of the volume.
Majority of the layers in CNN turns input image to features.
Only the last few layers are used for classification [28]. A
general architecture of CNN is depicted in Fig. 4.
The basic building blocks of a CNN are briefly discussed
here.
1) Convolution Layer (ConVLayer)
A ConvLayer is the core of a CNN. It composes of a
set of learnable filters (also known as kernels). Each
kernel extends through the depth of the image (RGB
channels form the depth) but it is spatially small in
width and height. A convolution is applied between
the kernel and entire image as shown in Fig. 5. This
convolution computes the dot product of entries of the
kernel and the image space that it occupies. As a result
a 2D activation map is produced which represents the
response of the kernel at every spatial location in the
image. This convolution operation is repeated with other
set of filters and produce more 2D activation maps. Once
the the image is convoluted with different filters/kernels,
a stack of filtered images with different features is
obtained.
2) Rectified Linear Unit (ReLu)
Rectified Linear Unit layer is mostly used as an acti-
vation function to the output of previous layers. This
layer returns zero if the input is negative and returns the
same number for positive values. Mathematically, it is
represented as f (x) = max(0, x). Other functions such
as, tanh and sigmoid are also available.
3) Max pooling layer
This layer performs down sampling of the features that
are extracted in convolution layer. This process can be
looked at as dimensionality reduction. In max pooling
layer, the image is segmented into non-overlapping rect-
angles and outputs the maximum value from each sub-
 

Fig. 6. Schematic of the framework of VGG16 convolution neural network.
Fig. 7. Training accuracy and validation loss of VGG16 convolution neural network for islanding detection.
region. Apart from maximum, other functions such as,
average pooling and L2 norm pooling are also available.
4) Fully connected layer
In a fully connected layer a list of features becomes a list
of votes. In other words, this layer produces class scores
from the activations that will be used for classification.
An important aspect be noted is that, two CNNs with the
same exact architecture will have a different behaviour based
on the training data that it is fed to them. The behaviour of
the network is learned from the data itself, leading to a data
driven approach.
Once the architecture of a CNN is designed the next phase
is to train the CNN with a huge amount of data. This training
phase generally takes a lot of time and is usually performed on
graphical processing units (GPU) for enhanced speed. Since
it takes a lot of resources, computational, time and men, to
design, test, train and evaluate the performance of a CNN it
is a good practice to reuse the best architectures that have
demonstrated superior performances. The process of reusing
a model that has performed well for a certain task to solve a
112
different but related task is known as Transfer Learning (TL).
V. M ETHODOLOGY
Once the time-series data is converted to images, the
entire islanding detection problem now becomes an image
classification problem. The proposed method uses Transfer
Learning approach to classify islanding and non-islanding
events treating it as an image classification problem.
To implement transfer learning, a pre-trained CNN, VGG16
is used. VGG16 is a CNN that is trained on 1 million images
and it can classify over 1000 classes of images. It has been
placed among the best performers in the ImageNet competition
in 2014 for demonstrating lowest error till that time [29]. A
general architecture of VGG16 is shown in Fig. 6. Since our
problem is also related to image classification, we can make
use of transfer learning concept to reuse the CNN architecture
of VGG16 and make necessary modifications as needed.
To suit the requirement of classifying islanding events,
necessary changes have been made to the last few layers
of VGG16 network. One major change is that in VGG16,
the classification layer is designed to classify 1000 classes.
 

Fig. 8. Confusion matrix for testing data on VGG16 convolution neural
network.
Therefore, the classification layer is appropriately configured
for binary classification to suit the problem at hand. The
learning rate (α) has been chosen as 0.001 and the stochastic
gradient descent with momentum as optimization algorithm.
For training purpose 60% of images from each class are used.
The remaining 40% is used for testing the network on unseen
cases. Initially, a total of 20 epochs are set for” training. It
can be seen from the Fig. 7, that the training loss is zero and
accuracy is 100% after the training process. On a single CPU
it took 367 miutes to train the network.
VI. R ESULTS
The performance of the network is assessed by testing it
with a new set of images. In this case a total of 44 images, 22
islanding and 22 grid connected, are used for testing. These
images are not used in the training process. This approach will
be useful to asses the performance of the CNN for unseen data.
The performance of CNN can be visualized by a confusion
matrix. Fig. 8 depicts the confusion matrix for the VGG16
CNN used for islanding detection. It can be seen that all
22 islanding cases have been classified as islanding and all
22 grid connected cases as grid connected events. In terms
of accuracy, this is equivalent to 100%. The results achieved
show the potential of transfer learning technique for islanding
detection.
VII. C ONCLUSION
A new approach has been proposed in this paper which
treats islanding detection problem as an image classification
problem. This is made possible by converting time series
data into scalogram images. These images are obtained by
applying continuous wavelet transform to the voltage signals
acquired from the PCC. The state of all the three phases can
be represented in a single image. In the next step, a pre-
trained network, VGG16, is used to apply transfer learning.
Few modifications have been made to the pre-trained VGG16
CNN to suit the requirements of islanding detection. The
113
network is trained with both islanding and non-islanding image
data. Accuracy of the proposed method is 100% for a testing
data of 44, which has 22 images from islanding class and 22
images from grid connected class. It has been demonstrated
that transfer learning can be effectively applied for islanding
detection problem.
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