Integrating Safety into Microgrid Sizing: A Systematic Review

Microgrid sizing has traditionally been driven by economic, technical, environmental, and social criteria, while safety has often been treated implicitly or addressed at later stages of design and operation. In this context, safety refers to the prevention of unacceptable harm to people, assets, and the environment through appropriate design margins, protection coordination, operational limits, and risk-aware system configuration. However, the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources, battery energy storage systems, power electronics, and advanced digital control architectures has elevated safety to a critical design dimension that directly influences sizing decisions. Despite its importance, safety remains fragmented across the microgrid literature and lacks unified treatment within sizing-oriented studies. This paper presents a systematic review of microgrid sizing methodologies with a specific focus on safety-related indicators. The review critically examines how distinct safety dimensions—namely energy storage safety, protection and fault tolerance, operational margins and redundancy, grid interaction, cybersecurity, human and environmental safety—are addressed within traditional, artificial-intelligence-based, software-driven, and hybrid sizing approaches. Safety is conceptualized as a cross-cutting design constraint that shapes sizing variables and feasibility boundaries rather than as an independent optimization objective. By synthesizing the existing literature, this work identifies the safety dimensions most strongly coupled with sizing decisions. The paper further analyses how safety-related constraints can be incorporated into sizing frameworks and highlights key research gaps that hinder their systematic integration. The findings aim to provide a structured reference for researchers and practitioners seeking to embed safety considerations into microgrid sizing methodologies.