Electrical Power and Energy Systems 124 (2021) 106399

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Electrical Power and Energy Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijepes

Fault diagnosis of shipboard medium-voltage DC power system based on T

machine learning
⁎
Sheng Liua, Yue Suna,b, , Lanyong Zhanga, Peng Suc
a
College of Automation, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
b
Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119077, Singapore
c
China Ship Development and Design Center, Wuhan, 430064, China

A B S T R A C T

This study proposed a fault diagnosis method of a shipboard medium-voltage DC (MVDC) power system based on Noise-Assisted Multivariate Empirical Mode
Decomposition (NA-MEMD) and Multilevel Iterative – LightGBM (MI-LightGBM), which overcomes the limitations of the existing fault diagnosis methods in this
regard, such as relies heavily on the relay or slow training process. MI-LightGBM is proposed to solve the problem of unbalanced training samples caused by the
difficulty in obtaining fault samples in practical engineering. First, NA-MEMD was adopted to pre-process the voltage signals, which were decomposed into a set of
components called Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) according to the local characteristic time scales of the original signals. The energy moment of each order IMF was
calculated as fault feature vector to train the MI-LightGBM model, which led to the development of a high-precision fault classifier. A model of a shipboard MVDC
power system was established using the AppSIM Real-Time Simulator. Simulations were performed on earth fault and short-circuit fault at the generator output and
DC cable. Compared with the existing fault diagnosis methods, the proposed method is simple to use and save more than half of the training time while maintaining
high diagnostic performance, which is more suitable for engineering applications.

1. Introduction
Shipboard integrated power system, especially medium-voltage DC
(MVDC) [1], is a current main trend in the development of high-tech
shipboard power systems and have been gradually adopted as the main
power systems for next-generation naval vessels [2]. A shipboard
MVDC power system can be regarded as an independent controlled
microgrid that is powered by distributed generation units and is more
fragile and prone to failure than conventional power grids. This result
in a rapid increase in fault current, which poses a great threat to system
safety and thereby places a high safety requirement on the system.
However, the fault diagnosis of an MVDC power system is still in its
infancy, with many problems remaining to be solved [3].
The existing fault detection methods consist of traditional ones and
new ones [4], with the traditional ones including AC/DC Side Over-
current Protection, Directional Protection and Current Differential
Protection, and the new ones including Short-time Fourier Transform
[5], Wavelet Transforms (WT) [6], and Artificial Neural Networks.
Baran et al. [7] developed a fault detection and fast isolation method
for multiterminal dc systems that is based on the idea of overcurrent
protection. This method, however, is prone to interference, and the
setting of overcurrent threshold is subjective. Monadi et al. [8] pro-
posed a central protection strategy for medium-voltage DC microgrids
that divides the microgrids into several regions. They design centralized
protection units for centralized control, and uses differential elements
for fault detection. However, this method requires many sub-microgrid
relays (SMR) to be set in each region and has a strong dependence on
SMR, making the diagnostic accuracy subject to SMR. Chanda et al. [9]
designed a fault classification and localization methodology for MVDC
shipboard power systems, building a system model based on PSCAD and
using an ANN-based approach to quickly and accurately detect faults on
DC cables. However, this methodology relies on all data for diagnosis,
which leads to slow training of the ANN-based classifier model. Li et al.
[10,11] proposed a method based on wavelet transform multiresolution
analysis and artificial neural networks for fault diagnosis of MVDC
shipboard power systems. This method does not require interzone
communication and external signal injection. It has high generalization
capability for application to systems with different parameters. How-
ever, the training speed of ANN is slow, so it is not suitable for dealing
with the problem of large amount of data. Eristi et al. [12] proposed a
power system disturbances detection method based on WT and support
vector machines (SVM). The method has high accuracy, strong ro-
bustness and small random-access memory (RAM), but it is difficult to
select the parameters of wavelet and SVM. Given that the range of
shipboard MVDC power system is large, traditional fault detection
methods require the system to be divided in detail and many relays to
be installed, which results in a high financial burden. Moreover, da-
mage to one relay would result in failure of the detection. For MVDC

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: 576194000@hrbeu.edu.cn (Y. Sun).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijepes.2020.106399
Received 22 March 2020; Received in revised form 18 June 2020; Accepted 24 July 2020
Available online 07 August 2020
0142-0615/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
S. Liu, et al.
Table 1
Comparative studies of fault feature extraction methods.
Method Advantages
Fourier Transform [5] 1. Simple principle
2. It can well describe the frequency characteristics of signals
WT [14] 1. Highlight frequency features through variable window size
2. Suitable for non-stationary signals
EMD [15] 1. Without a need to pre-set any basis function
2. strong adaptability
MEMD [16] 1. It can process multi-channel signals simultaneously
2. Multi-channel signals have waveform similarity on the same
scale
systems, a small fault would likely paralyze the entire system. The ex-
isting new detection methods are not only subjected to a slow model
training process but also require the model parameters to be carefully
adjusted to meet the accuracy requirement for fault detection.
Many signal processing methods have been applied to the analysis
of power systems. In Table 1, the advantages and disadvantages of
several fault feature extraction methods for fault diagnosis are shown. It
can be seen that many of them are limited in the simultaneous pro-
cessing of multi-channel signals. The emergence of noise-assisted mul-
tivariate empirical mode decomposition (NA-MEMD) [13] solves the
above problem. It performs signal decomposition based on the time-
scale features of the data without a need to pre-set any basis functions.
Its biggest advantage is that it can process multi-channel signals si-
multaneously to obtain intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) that have the
same dimension and matched frequencies so as to facilitate later ana-
lysis. NA-MEMD eliminates the problems of the endpoint effect and
modal aliasing in the EMD method by introducing a new independent
channel of auxiliary white noise while ensuring that the original signals
are not contaminated by the white-noise signal. The main frequency
components of the original signal clearly exist in the IMF, so NA-MEMD
is very suitable for fault feature extraction.
LightGBM [17] is a machine learning algorithm based on gradient
boosting decision tree (GBDT) [18], which mainly employs two new
technologies, namely gradient-based one-side sampling (GOSS) and
exclusive feature bundling (EFB), to ensure that the method is fast and
accurate. It adopts a histogram-based algorithm to effectively exploit
the sparsity characteristics of large-scale data, allows for extremely fast
training and diagnosis. It also has an increased robustness to noise,
thereby making it very suitable for engineering applications [19]. In
practical engineering, the system is usually in normal operation, and in
rare cases, the failure occurs, so the number of fault samples is much
smaller than the normal sample. Among the training samples, the
normal samples account for the majority and can be regarded as simple
samples. A large number of simple samples guide the direction of gra-
dient updating method of the classifier, which will affect the accuracy
of fault samples. In the model training process, the training stops as
long as the overall accuracy reaches the training requirements. That is
to say, the classification accuracy of the model for a large number of
normal samples is high, and it can also meet the training requirements.
This makes the training of fault samples inadequate, and the accuracy
of fault classification is lower than that of normal state. In order to solve
the above problems, this paper proposes a Multilevel Iterative-
LightGBM (MI-LightGBM). This method weights the samples with low
classification confidence level, so that the model increases the training
gradient and improve the classification accuracy of the samples with
insufficient training. MI-LightGBM not only increases the diagnostic
accuracy of the fault samples, but also weights the normal samples
which are not well fitted, thus further improving the overall accuracy.
This paper proposes a fault diagnosis model combining NA-MEMD
and MI-LightGBM that can be used for fault diagnosis of a shipboard
2
Electrical Power and Energy Systems 124 (2021) 106399
Disadvantages
1. Lack of extraction of time and frequency information
2. Limited to non-stationary signals
3. Poor sensitivity to abrupt signal
1. Has to select proper basis wavelets and decomposition levels according to different
signals
2. Cannot be simultaneously applied to multi-channel signals
1. Endpoint effect
2. Modal aliasing
3. Cannot be simultaneously applied to multi-channel signals
1. Endpoint effect
2. Modal aliasing
MVDC power system with faults including the generator phase-to-phase
short circuit, earth fault, and DC cable ground fault. The methodology
involves the following steps. First, an MVDC power system model is
built in the AppSIM Real Time Simulator to simulate various faults,
with fault voltages pre-processed by NA-MEMD. The NA-MEMD de-
composes the signals into the sum of a set of IMFs according to the local
characteristic time scales of the signals to describe the signal frequency
components, which can effectively characterize important signal
properties. Next, energy moments of IMFs are calculated. These energy
moments are used as fault feature vectors based on joint consideration
of two aspects: the energy magnitude of each order IMF and the tem-
poral distribution of IMF energy. Finally, MI-LightGBM is used as a fault
classifier to accurately classify fault feature vectors. The proposed fault
diagnosis method is not affected by electric parameters such as cable
inductance and impedance of the generator and propulsion motor, and
not subject to external interference; furthermore, it does not need inter
region communication and has strong generalization ability. It solves
the problem of classification error deviation caused by sample im-
balance.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we introduce the
MVDC power system model used in this paper. Feature engineering and
fault classification are presented in Section 3. In Section 4, we introduce
a detailed numerical simulation to validate the effectiveness of the
proposed fault diagnosis method of the power system. Finally, the
conclusions are drawn in Section 5.
2. Model of shipboard MVDC power system
The original conceptual model of a shipboard MVDC power system
that was established by the Electric Ship Research and Development
Consortium (ESRDC) [20,21] was simplified in this study to obtain a
MVDC power system conceptual model (Fig. 1). This model consists of
two power generation module (PGM): the main PGM and auxiliary
PGM. The main PGM contained a twin-shaft gas turbine as the prime
mover (a single-shaft gas turbine used in the auxiliary PGM) to drive the
notional round rotor synchronous machine, and an IEEE AC8B exciter
was used as the excitation system. The prime mover provides an input
power to the synchronous machine model, which, in turn, provides the
shaft speed as feedback. A six-pulse diode rectifier was employed to
convert alternating current into direct current, which was delivered
through RL cables to the loads. The propulsion system is equivalized to
a motor drive inverter and a motor. The service loads are modelled as
constant power loads (CPLs) and connected to the main grid via power
electronic converters. The DC voltage of the system is 5 kV. The main
parameters in the MVDC power system model are shown in Table 2.
AC system is the main power supply source of DC power grid. When
AC system fails, fault current will affect DC side through converter. The
faults at the output of the synchronous machine in main PGM and
auxiliary PGM is simulated in this paper. There are single-phase earth
fault M - F1, two-phase earth fault M - F2 , two-phase short-circuit fault
S. Liu, et al.
Fig. 1. MVDC power system model.
M - F11, and three-phase short-circuit fault M - F3 of main PGM, single-
phase earth faultA - F1, two-phase earth fault A - F2 , two-phase short-
circuit fault A - F11, and three-phase short-circuit fault A - F3 of aux-
iliary PGM. Since the main and auxiliary power generation have dif-
ferent contributions to the power of the DC grid, the impact of the main
and auxiliary power generation faults on the DC gird is different. Single-
phase earth fault, two-phase earth fault, two-phase short-circuit fault is
asymmetric fault. When the asymmetric fault occurs on the AC side, the
phase voltage at the fault point decreases instantaneously, and the
current is opposite. Faults on the AC side also affect the voltage and
current waveforms on the DC side. The asymmetrical fault of AC side
makes the voltage and current of DC side fluctuate, but it does not cause
DC over-voltage and over-current. Three-phase short-circuit fault is the
most serious type of AC side, which will have a serious impact on the
DC power system. When three-phase short-circuit fault occurs at AC
side, the current after the short-circuit point is cut off, so the voltage
and current of DC bus will be greatly affected. DC fault FDC was also
studied in this paper, which will have a fatal effect on the DC power
system. After the DC fault occurs, the DC current will increase sharply,
and the voltage of the pole with the DC fault is 0. Therefore, the voltage
on DC bus can be used to judge both DC fault and AC system fault. The
fault earth resistance is 0.01 Ω.
3. Fault diagnosis method
3.1. Feature engineering
Feature engineering is a particularly important step in fault diag-
nosis. If machine learning is directly applied to raw data to construct a
fault diagnosis model, model training will be slow owing to large data
dimensions. This is because this algorithm cannot automatically extract
meaningful information from the original data. Therefore, it is neces-
sary to pre-process raw data to obtain appropriate feature vectors so as
to establish a more efficient fault diagnosis model. In other words, raw
data is obtained first, from which meaningful features are extracted
Table 2
Parameters of the MVDC power system model.
Prime mover (main Generator (main Prime mover Generator (auxiliary
PGM) PGM) (auxiliary PGM) PGM)
Twin-shaft Synchronous Single-shaft Synchronous
36 MW 47 MVA 4 MW 5 MVA
3600 rpm 3600 rpm 14400 rpm 14400 rpm
3
Electrical Power and Energy Systems 124 (2021) 106399
using data processing technology while removing interfering informa-
tion; next, machine learning is performed on the features to generate
the desired fault diagnosis model. This paper proposed using an NA-
MEMD method to pre-process the fault data and highlight the useful
information in the data for fault diagnosis.
3.1.1. NA-MEMD method
When using a traditional empirical mode decomposition method to
analyze multi-channel vibration signals, solutions will be separately
sought for each signal. This results in a different number and scale of
IMFs decomposed in each channel, which is not conducive to the cor-
relation analysis between multi-channel signals at the same time,
thereby degrading the accuracy of fault diagnosis. The NA-MEMD
method can process multi-channel signals simultaneously and decom-
pose them into IMFs with the same dimensions, which makes it easier to
conduct subsequent component analysis. NA-MEMD processes mixed
signals consisting of multi-channel signals and gaussian white noise of
independent channels. In dealing with white noise, the characteristics
of MEMD binary filter banks are fully utilized to solve the modal
aliasing phenomenon in MEMD. It can effectively separate the original
signal and auxiliary white noise after decomposition. It has strong
adaptability and robustness and can provide high decomposition ac-
curacy in the presence of background noise. The NA-MEMD method
decomposes the signal into IMF components with different character-
istic time scales.
The detailed steps are as follows.
For a-dimensional variable input signal, the detailed steps of the
NA-MEMD algorithm are as follows.
Step 1: Generate a p -channel irrelevant Gaussian white noise signal
s (t ) = {s1 (t ), s2 (t ), …, sp (t )} , the length j of which is the same as the
original signal x (t ) .
Step 2: Combine the p -channel Gauss white noise signal s (t ) with the
q -channel original signal x (t ) to form the g -channel multivariate signal
z (t ) = {z1 (t ), z2 (t ), …, z g (t )} , where g = q + p .
Step 3: Use the Hammersley sequence sampling method to obtain a
proper direction vector of the n -dimensional space on the (n − 1) -di-
mensional spherical surface.
Step 4: Calculate the projection P k (t ) of the signal z (t ) along the
k -th direction vector X k , where l is the total number of direction vectors
and k = 1, 2, …, l .
Step 5: Find the time tik corresponding to the maximum and
minimum values of the projection pk (t ) .
Step 6: Apply multivariable spline interpolation to the extreme
point [tik , x (tik )], and obtain the multivariate envelope E k (t ) .
Step 7: For the l direction vector of sphere space, calculate the mean
m (t ) of envelope curve as
l
1
m (t ) =
l
∑ Ek (t )
k=1 (1)
Step 8: Use Di (t ) = x (t ) − m (t ) to calculate the i -th order intrinsic
mode function Di (t ) . If Di (t ) satisfies the multivariate IMF criterion,
Di (t ) is the i -th multivariate IMF component, and the formula for cal-
culating the residual function is ri (t ) = x (t ) − Di (t ) . Then, ri (t ) is taken
as the new initial signal. The above steps are continued until the re-
sidual function ri (t ) becomes a monotonic function; then, the sieving
process is stopped. Otherwise, use Di (t ) instead of the raw data to repeat
Propulsion motor Service Inductance of cable (per Length of
loads meter) cable
Synchronous 10 MVA 4.77e-7H 200 m
36.5 MW
120 rpm
S. Liu, et al.
steps 4–7 until the stop criteria are met.
Step 9: Decompose the (q + p) -dimensional IMF component after
the above steps are completed. Among them, the p -dimensional IMF
components generated by the auxiliary noise channel decomposition
are discarded, and finally the IMF component obtained by decomposing
the q -dimensional channels from the original signal is obtained.
Different signals have the same number of IMFs after processed by
NA-MEMD, and the same frequency components in the different signals
exist in same order IMF components, which makes subsequent fault
analysis less difficult.
3.1.2. Energy moment
To characterize the difference between different forms of faults in a
more straightforward manner, it is necessary to obtain distinctive
characteristic information through analysis and calculation. A diagnosis
model established using characteristic information will have lower
model complexity but higher sensitivity and accuracy for fault identi-
fication. When a short circuit or ground fault occurs, the frequency of
the voltage and current changes, which in turn leads to changes in the
energy distribution. Therefore, when working with different faults, the
energy of the signal changes with the working condition of the system.
We calculated the energy moment of the IMF to form a fault feature
vector [22]. This method considers the effect of a time scale on energy
entropy and can represent failure information more comprehensively.
The detailed calculation of the IMF energy moment is as follows.
Step 1: The q -channel signals are decomposed by NA-MEMD, and
the IMF component c1, c2, …, cN and residual function Res are obtained.
Step 2: The energy moment of c1, c2, …, cN is calculated as shown in
Eq. (2). The energy moment ER of the residual function Res is calculated
by Eq. (3).
En = ∫ t |cn (t )|2 dt (2)
ER = ∫ t |Res|2 dt (3)
where n = 1, 2, …, N . Then, all the IMFs energy moments consist of the
eigenvector T .
T = [E1, E2, …, EN , ER] (4)
Step 3: Normalizing the energy moment of IMF results in
N 1 2
⎛ ⎞
E = ⎜ ∑ |En |2 + |ER |2 ⎟
⎝n=1 ⎠ (5)
E E E E
T = ⎡ 1 , 2 , …, N , R ⎤
⎣E E E E⎦ (6)
Therefore, T is the extracted fault feature vector.
3.2. Fault identification
The GBDT is a popular machine learning algorithm that has drawn
extensive attention since introduction. It can be implemented in various
forms, such as XGBoost and pGBRT. XGBoost is a highly efficient im-
plementation of the GBDT algorithm and contains many optimizations,
improving the generalization capability of the model. However, it fails
to give satisfactory operating speeds and results when handling ex-
tremely large data dimensions and magnitudes. This is because, when
performing judgement on each feature, the models are required to
calculate the information gain of each split based on all the original
data. This practice is advantageous in that it considers all possibilities,
but it is computationally intensive and time-consuming with a large
memory footprint. To solve this problem, Microsoft proposed a method
known as LightGBM in 2017, which contains many new methods that
improve the model. It has many advantages compared with conven-
tional algorithms, such as the ability to allow faster model training and
higher accuracy, support parallel learning, and process large-scale data
4
Electrical Power and Energy Systems 124 (2021) 106399
with a smaller memory footprint.
3.3. LightGBM
To overcome the above shortcomings, two novel technologies are
proposed in LightGBM, namely gradient-based one-side sampling
(GOSS) and exclusive feature bundling (EFB).
a. GOSS is employed as a sampling algorithm to reduce the number
of samples.
Traditional AdaBoost uses weights to measure the importance of a
dataset, assigning larger weights to samples that have given poor
training results so that the training of the next base learner will be
based more on these samples. In other words, the training data can be
selected according to the weights so as to reduce the training burden.
LightGBM uses a brand-new GOSS-based technology to filter data in-
stances to find split values. Based on the above principle, LightGBM
overcomes the problem that GBDT faces, which is that GBDT uses all
the datasets for each training owing to the lack of weight and thereby
slows the computation speed. LightGBM reduces the amount of data to
be analyzed while ensuring the accuracy of the learning model.
b. EFB is employed to pre-process the sparse data and reduce the
number of features.
As its name suggests, exclusive feature bundling is centered on the
principle that several features are combined to effectively reduce the
number of features. Most high-dimension datasets are sparse. The
sparsity of features indicates that many features are mutually exclusive.
This method exploits this attribute to bind mutually exclusive features
together, converting a sparse matrix into a dense matrix. This strategy
leads to a smaller number of features while not affecting the model’s
performance, thereby speeding up the training. After placing features in
different scopes into the same bundle, it is necessary to ensure that the
values of the original features before bundling can be accurately iden-
tified in the bundle. In order to ensure that the values between features
do not conflict, the value range of features in the merged bundle is
rebuilt by adding offset.
LightGBM adopts split search algorithm based on histogram, which
brings great convenience to operation. Regardless of whether it is a
discrete feature or a continuous feature, the histogram algorithm will
process the feature value according to the discrete feature. It discrete
the feature value into discrete values and construct histogram. Then
traverse the training data and count the cumulative statistics of each
discrete value in the histogram. When performing feature selection,
only the discrete value of histogram is needed to traverse to find the
optimal segmentation point. The use of histogram algorithm does not
need to store the pre-sorting results, only save the value of discrete
features, which reduces the memory consumption of the algorithm.
In addition to the above two major technical improvements,
LightGBM uses a leaf-wise strategy to generate trees to reduce un-
necessary split costs, so that it has a lower memory footprint and higher
computation speed with good accuracy. Although this may lead to
overfitting, LightGBM adds a maximum depth limit, thereby solving the
problem.
3.4. Multilevel Iterative LightGBM
Unbalanced training data is one of the biggest problems in machine
learning. In practical engineering, it is very difficult to obtain fault
samples. Therefore, the number of fault samples is less than the number
of normal samples. The fault diagnosis often needs to face the problem
of sample imbalance. In this case, the update of the training gradient
will be more biased towards the normal samples. This will result in that
although the overall classification accuracy of classifier meets the
training requirements, the diagnosis accuracy of fault samples is very
low. In order to make LightGBM more suitable for application in the
field of fault diagnosis and solve the above problems, this paper pro-
posed the MI-LightGBM. This method solves the above problems by
S. Liu, et al. Electrical Power and Energy Systems 124 (2021) 106399

increasing the weight of samples with misclassification or low classifi-

cation confidence. The detailed improvement methods are as follows.
The improved objective function is expressed by Eq. (7):
n
Obj (t ) = ∑ κi l (yi , y i(t−1) + ft (x i )) + Ω(ft ) + con
i=1 (7)
where the weight κi is expressed as

c conf k < tv
κi = ⎧
⎨1
⎩ conf k > tv (8)
n
∑ probk (j ) − max probk
j=1
conf k = max probk −
n−1 (9)
In Eq. (18), Ω( ) is regularization term. c is a constant, and
conf k denotes the classification confidence level of sample k, which
measures the reliability of the classification result; tv is a pre-set
threshold, n is the number of categories, and probk (j ) denotes the
probability that sample k falls in category j . The tv needs to be de-
termined according to the application scenarios. In this paper, tv = 0.9
to ensure the high reliability of the fault diagnosis model. After each
training, if the classification confidence level is lower than the
threshold, it indicates that the classification result has a low reliability,
and therefore, the weight of sample k will be increased in the set of
training samples to obtain a new sample set. Model training will be
conducted using the new sample set. This strategy allows the model to
preferentially fit the samples with low classification reliabilities to
improve model accuracy. However, the training accuracy will decrease
if the model over-fits the data. Therefore, as the number of training
iterations increases, the model accuracy will increase first and then
decrease. In this study, the number of training iterations that gives the
highest model accuracy will be experimentally determined, so that a
final classification model can be established.

4. Experiment

4.1. Experimental description

A numerical simulation based on the AppSIM real-time simulator

was conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed fault di-
agnosis method of the ship MVDC power system. The MVDC power
system model introduced in Section 2 was implemented on an AppSIM
real-time simulator so that the switching details of the power electronic
converter could be simulated in real-time. The configuration of the
AppSIM real-time simulator is shown in Fig. 2. Single-phase earth fault,
two-phase earth fault, two-phase short-circuit fault, and three-phase
short-circuit fault were simulated on a synchronous generator, and a

Fig. 3. Fault waveforms on the DC cable.

short-circuit fault on a DC bus was simulated on an RL cable with the

MVDC power system model. Five signals were collected to analyze fault
information simultaneously. There are the voltageM − Va , M − Vb at
the output of the synchronous machine in the main PGM, the
voltage A − Va , A − Vb at the output of the synchronous machine in the
auxiliary PGM and the DC voltage Vdc on the DC cable.
For fault waveforms, the simulation duration was set to 10 s, while
the fault was set from 5 s. The fundamental sample time was 1e−5 s.
The voltage waveforms on the DC cable in different states are shown in
Fig. 3.
Fig. 2. Configuration of the AppSIM real time simulator.

5
S. Liu, et al.
4.2. Feature engineering
The voltage signals within 10 ms after fault is used for fault detec-
tion [4]. The NA-MEMD method was adopted to simultaneously pre-
process the signals of M − Va, M − Vb, A − Va, A − Vb, Vdc in each
system state. In NA-MEMD, the amplitude and the number of channels
of the added noise are selected according to experience [13]. Ex-
cessively low noise power cannot constitute a stable quasi- dyadic filter
bank structure for input data, resulting in endpoint effects and modal
aliasing in the decomposition results. Although the increase of noise
power will enhance the structure of the quasi-dyadic filter bank struc-
ture, the excessive noise power will damage the data-driven ability of
the algorithm. In this study, we set the number of auxiliary white-noise
channels to 2, and the noise variance was 0.1. Different frequencies of
voltage components would lead to different characteristic time scales in
a different fault state of the system, which would result in different final
results of NA-MEMD. Signal pre-processing with NA-MEMD has strong
robustness, with negligible interference from the I/O noise of AppSIM,
that is, the process of signal denoising could be omitted. Moreover, the
NA-MEMD method can simultaneously process signals in five channels
and decompose them into the same number of IMFs, thereby avoiding
loss of local features and maximizing preservation of dynamic features
of the signals. It makes feature analysis less challenging. Then, we
calculated the energy moments of the IMFs. Since the voltage signals
are used as the original signal, which only contains the frequency of
signal itself and I/O noise of APPSIM, the energy moments of some
order of IMFs is very small or almost zero. These energy moments in-
dicate that the correlation between the IMF and the original signal is
very small, which is not the main component of it. Instead of ignoring
these small energy moments, this study used them to form feature
vectors for training the fault classification model. Because of EFB
technology, LightGBM performs very well in dealing with sparse data.
The feature vectors close to 0 would not have adverse impacts on di-
agnosis results. Instead, they would be beneficial for model training in
MI-LightGBM and improve training accuracy.
4.3. Fault classification
MI-LightGBM, which was implemented in Python, was adopted as
the fault classifier. By using the above-extracted fault feature vectors as
model inputs in MI-LightGBM, a fault diagnosis model of the MVDC
power system was established. The experimental process is shown in
Fig. 4. In each system state, 1000 datasets were selected to form 10,000
sets of samples. From these sets, 7000 sets were randomly selected as
Fig. 4. Experimental process of proposed fault diagnosis.
6
Electrical Power and Energy Systems 124 (2021) 106399
Table 3
The parameters of MI-LightGBM.
Parameter Value Parameter Value
Boosting_type gbdt Learning_rate 0.06
Objective multiclass Feature_fraction 0.8
Num_class 10 Bagging_fraction 0.8
Metric multi_error Bagging_freq 5
Num_leaves 80 Lambda_11 0.4
Min_data_in_leaf 100 Lambda_128 0.5
Min_gain_to_split 0.2 max_depth 7
training data, and the remaining 3000 sets were used as the test data.
The parameters of LightGBM are optimized by Grid SearchCV. The
parameter settings are specified in Table 3.
4.3.1. Comparison with other intelligent fault diagnosis methods
The performance of fault classifier based on MI-LightGBM was
compared with those of other intelligent methods, and the experimental
results are shown in Table 4. The testing time represents the time that
the classifier detects all the 3000 test samples. As can be seen from
Table 4, the MI-LightGBM method has excellent performance in each
index. Although the training speed of k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and
logical regression (LR) is very fast, the other indexes of these two
classifiers cannot meet the requirements of shipboard MVDC power
system fault diagnosis. The classifier based on fuzzy NN can achieve
good classification performance, but it needs too long training time. In
actual engineering, the number of training samples is larger, this
shortcoming will be more obvious. Therefore, under the condition of
high diagnosis performance, the fault classification method proposed in
this paper takes the shortest time. These results reveal that the MI-
LightGBM-based fault classification method proposed in this study has
great advantages in training large datasets. It effectively solves the
conventional problem of low computational efficiency by ensuring
model accuracy while speeding up the operation of the classifier model.
It can also be seen from Table 4 that in addition to the advantages in
training speed and accuracy, the method proposed in this paper still has
a good performance in precision, sensitivity, and F1-score. The ex-
periment of the fault classifier with different cable inductance and
impedance of the generator and propulsion motor is also completed.
The experimental results are very similar to those shown in Table 4, so
they are not listed. It shows that these parameters will not affect the
fault diagnosis results. The fault diagnosis method proposed in this
paper can not be affected by these electric parameters.
Receiver operator characteristic curve (ROC) curve is used to
compare the reliability of seven classifiers. In the ROC curve diagram,
the horizontal axis is false positive rate = 1 − specificity . The larger
false positive rate is, the more actual negative classes are predicted in
the positive category. The vertical axis represents
true positive rate = sensitivity . The larger true positive rate, the more
actual positive classes among the predicted positive classes. Therefore,
the larger the sensitivity and specificity (ROC curve closer to (0,1)
point), the better the performance of the classifier. Area under curve
(AUC) value is the area size under ROC curve. Obviously, AUC is di-
rectly proportional to classification performance. It can be seen from
Fig. 5 that XGBoost, LightGBM and MI-LightGBM can perform well in
all classes. Although the average AUC value of other classifiers is high,
the diagnosis of certain types of faults will not be effective. This means
that there will be a high probability of making a wrong judgment on
this kind of fault, which may lead to the paralysis the whole shipboard
MVDC power system.
4.3.2. Comparison between LightGBM and MI-LightGBM under different
sample proportions
In order to verify the superiority of the proposed method, the model
performance of LightGBM and MI-LightGBM is evaluated at different
S. Liu, et al. Electrical Power and Energy Systems 124 (2021) 106399

Table 4
Indicators for different fault classifiers.
Methods Training time (s) Testing time (s) Average accuracy (%) Weight precision (%) Weight sensitivity (%) Weight F1-score (%)

KNN [23] 2.652 0.851 94.267 95.635 94.267 93.959

Decision Tree C4.5 [24] 22.157 0.085 98.633 98.637 98.633 98.632
Fuzzy NN [25] 123.974 0.096 99.167 99.168 99.167 99.166
LR [26] 2.481 1.547 99.233 99.238 99.233 99.233
XGBoost [27] 87.721 0.283 99.771 99.300 99.300 93.300
LightGBM [17] 11.77 0.065 99.767 99.767 99.767 99.767
MI-LightGBM 12.32 0.071 99.773 99.773 99.773 99.773

sample proportions. In the case of unbalanced sample proportion, the Table 5

overall accuracy cannot accurately reflect the performance of the Meaning of TP, FP, FN and TN.
model. Therefore, the Precision-recall curve (PR-curve) is used as the Actual positive Actual negative
evaluation standard in this paper. The calculation formulas of precision
and recall are as follows: Predicted positive TP FP
Predicted negative FN TN
TP
Precision =
TP + FP (10)
results are shown in Fig. 6. Class 0 indicates normal condition and Class
TP
Recall = 1 indicates fault condition.
TP + FN (11)
It can be seen that in the case of sample ratios of 1:1 and 1:2, the
where the meaning of TP , FP , FN is shown in Table 5. The area en- accuracy difference between LightGBM and MI-LightGBM is very small.
closed by PR-curve indicates the accuracy, and the larger the area, the However, with the increase of sample proportion, MI-lightGBM shows
better the model performance. significant advantages. The classification performance of LightGBM is
A total of 1000 groups of short circuit fault on DC bus data and seriously affected by the sample proportion, especially the classification
normal data are selected for comparison. Set the ratio of fault samples of fault samples, which is only 43.6% in the case of 1:10. But MI-
and normal samples to 1:1, 1:2, 1:5, 1:10 respectively to verify the LightGBM can still guarantee good performance when the sample
performance of the model under different conditions. The experimental

Fig. 5. ROC curve of classifiers.

7
S. Liu, et al. Electrical Power and Energy Systems 124 (2021) 106399

Fig. 6. Precision-Recall curve under different sample proportions (left: LightGBM, right: MI-LightGBM).

proportion is very unbalanced. Therefore, it can be seen that the fault imbalance caused by the difficulty of obtaining fault samples in prac-
classifier based on MI -LightGBM proposed in this paper can still tical engineering.
maintain a relatively ideal classification result under the condition of
sample imbalance, which is more suitable for the problem of sample

8
S. Liu, et al. Electrical Power and Energy Systems 124 (2021) 106399

4.4. Comparison of fault feature extraction methods model, and a cumbersome application process. In particular, MI-
LightGBM was proposed for the imbalance of training samples in actual
A comparative experiment has been done to study the classification engineering. In the new method, the first step was to simultaneously
accuracies with different feature extraction methods. First, the data is pre-process the voltage signals of the synchronous motor and DC bus by
pre-processed using WT, EMD, EEMD and NA-MEMD methods, re- using NA-MEMD, which decomposed the multi-channel signals into
spectively. The feature extraction is then performed using variance, IMFs that contained local features of the signals. Next, the energy
distance evaluation technique, and energy moments. The detailed in- moments of the IMFs were calculated as fault feature vectors. Finally,
troduction of variance and distance evaluation technique are shown the fault feature vectors are used as input data to train the classifier
below. based on MI-LightGBM and get the fault diagnosis model. In the ex-
1) Variance: periment, a shipboard MVDC power system was established using the
N AppSIM Real Time Simulator. Fault feature extraction and fault clas-
1 sifier design were implemented using Python, and the results were
var =
N
∑ xi2
i=1 (12) compared with those of other fault diagnosis methods. The experi-
mental results revealed that the proposed method can achieve fast
where N is the number of sample point, x i , i = 1, 2, …, N is the input
training speed under the condition of ensuring the performance of
signal.
classifier. It has strong generalization ability and is more suitable for
2) Distance evaluation technique
for n categories, there is {f (j, k ) , j = 1, 2, …, n; k = 1, 2, …, Nj} , f (j, k ) engineering application. The main contributions of this study are
is the k-th feature of the i-th category. Nj is the number of features in i-th summarized as follows:
category. 1) NA-MEMD was successfully employed to pre-process voltage
a. Calculate the average distance of all features in i-th category. signals. It is still a relatively new algorithm which has few applications
in the area of fault diagnosis. NA-MEMD is an adaptive signal decom-
Nj Nj
1 1 1 position method that does not involve basis functions selection. It im-
Dj =
2 Nj
∑ Nj − 1
∑ |f (j,m) − f (j, k ) |
proves the accuracy of fault feature extraction and facilitates the next
m=1 k=1 (13)
step of feature analysis.
Then the average distance of Dj is 2) The existing problems in fault diagnosis of a shipboard MVDC
1
n power system were solved in this study by innovatively adopting a
Dw =
n
∑ Dj state-of-the-art machine learning method. MI-LightGBM was used as the
j=1 (14) fault classifier, which can get higher accuracy with shorter training
b. Calculate the average distance between n categories. time.
n
3) The MI-LightGBM method was proposed by improving the
1 LightGBM objective function. This method can still maintain a good
Dr =
n
∑ |d(j) − d|
j=1 (15) classification performance in the case of imbalance between fault
samples and normal samples. It solves the problem that it is difficult to
Nj
1 obtain fault samples in the actual engineering. Therefore, the fault di-
d (j) =
N
∑ f (j,k) agnosis method proposed in this study will be more suitable for en-
k=1 (16)
gineering applications.
n
1 4) The fault diagnosis method proposed in this study has high ac-
d=
n
∑ d(j) curacy and strong robustness. It does not need to rely on many relays
j=1 (17)
and is not subject to the impedance of the motor and the cable in-
c. The distance evaluation criteria is calculated as ductances. It has a strong generalization capability and may be applied
Dr to other systems in the future.
J=
Dw (18)
CRediT authorship contribution statement
According to the above description, the best feature can be selected
according to the larger distance evaluation criteria J . Sheng Liu: Investigation, Resources, Supervision, Funding acquisi-
The experimental results are shown in Fig. 7. It can be seen that the tion. Yue Sun: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation,
NA-MEMD + energy moment method used in this paper can obtain the Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Lanyong Zhang:
highest diagnostic accuracy. The NA-MEMD is an adaptive signal pro- Formal analysis, Project administration. Peng Su: Data curation,
cessing method, which does not need to select the mother wavelet and Visualization.
decomposition levels as WT. WT, EMD and EEMD can only process
single-channel signals, which has great limitations for multi-channel
Declaration of Competing Interest
signals. NA-MEMD is a multi-channel signal processing method, so as to
ensure that the number and frequency of IMFs in each channel are
matched. It has better adaptability and time–frequency localization The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
ability, and improve the accuracy of fault diagnosis. Using variance and interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
distance evaluation technology to represent fault features can only ence the work reported in this paper.
extract specific feature information, and most of the information will be
lost. This will lead to incomplete feature information extraction and Acknowledgments
affect the accuracy of diagnosis.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science
5. Conclusion Foundation of China subsidization project (51579047), the Natural
Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (QC2017048), the Natural
This paper proposed a fault diagnosis method based on NA-MEMD Science Foundation of Harbin (2016RAQXJ077), and the fundamental
and MI-LightGBM for shipboard MVDC power systems that simplified research funds for the central universities (3072019CF407). Miss Yue
complicated problems and overcame the shortcomings of existing Sun acknowledges the financial support from Chinese Scholarship
methods, such as reliance on relays, slow training of the classifier Council (CSC) under grant 201906680084.

9
S. Liu, et al.
Fig. 7. Accuracies of different feature extraction method.
Appendix A. Supplementary material
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.ijepes.2020.106399.
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