Energy Theft Detection in Smart Grids: Taxonomy, Comparative Analysis, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

Electricity theft is one of the major issues in developing countries which is affecting their economy badly. Especially with the introduction of emerging technologies, this issue became more complicated. Though many new energy theft detection (ETD) techniques have been proposed by utilising different data mining (DM) techniques, state network (SN) based techniques, and game theory (GT) techniques. Here, a detailed survey is presented where many state-of-the-art ETD techniques are studied and analysed for their strengths and limitations. Three levels of taxonomy are presented to classify state-of-the-art ETD techniques. Different types and ways of energy theft and their consequences are studied and summarised and different parameters to benchmark the performance of proposed techniques are extracted from literature. The challenges of different ETD techniques and their mitigation are suggested for future work. It is observed that the literature on ETD lacks knowledge management techniques that can be more effective, not only for ETD but also for theft tracking. This can help in the prevention of energy theft, in the future, as well as for ETD.