Automated early detection and identification of switch faults are essential in high-voltage applications. Modular multilevel converter (MMC) is a new and promising topology for such applications. MMC is composed of many identical controlled voltage sources called modules or cells. Each cell may have one or more switches and a switch failure may occur in anyone of these cells. The steady-state normal and fault behavior of a cell voltage will also significantly vary according to the changes in the load current and the fault timing. This makes it a challenging problem to detect and identify such faults as soon as they occur. In this study, we propose a real-time and highly accurate MMC circuit monitoring system for early fault detection and identification using adaptive 1D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The proposed approach is directly applicable to the raw voltage and current data and thus eliminates the need for any feature extraction algorithm, resulting in a highly efficient and reliable system. Simulation results obtained using a 4-cell, 8-switch MMC topology demonstrate that the proposed system has a high reliability to avoid any false alarm and achieves a detection probability of 0.989, and average identification probability of 0.997 in less than 100 ms.

To mitigate global warming and energy shortage, integration of renewable energy generation sources, energy storage systems, and plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) have been introduced in recent years. The application of electric vehicles (EV) in the smart grid has shown a significant option to reduce carbon emission. However, due to the limited battery capacity, managing the charging and discharging process of EV as a distributed power supply is a challenging task. Moreover, the unpredictable nature of renewable energy generation, uncertainties of plug-in electric vehicles associated parameters, energy prices, and the time-varying load create new challenges for the researchers and industries to maintain a stable operation of the power system. The EV battery charging management system plays a main role in coordinating the charging and discharging mechanism to efficiently realize a secure, efficient, and reliable power system. More recently, there has been an increasing interest in data-driven approaches in EV charging modeling. Consequently, researchers are looking to deploy model-free approaches for solving the EV charging management with uncertainties. Among many existing model-free approaches, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely used for EV charging management. Unlike other machine learning approaches, the RL technique is based on maximizing the cumulative reward. This article reviews the existing literature related to the RL-based framework, objectives, and architecture for the charging coordination strategies of electric vehicles in the power systems. In addition, the review paper presents a detailed comparative analysis of the techniques used for achieving different charging coordination objectives while satisfying multiple constraints. This article also focuses on the application of RL in EV coordination for research and development of the cutting-edge optimized energy management system (EMS), which are applicable for EV charging.