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Faults in the power system should be detected as soon as possible. Otherwise, some defects in the protection system can result in imposing considerable destructive damage to the system equipment. The excitation system of a synchronous generator plays a significant role in the proper operation and control of the generator. Loss-of-excitation (LOE) may cause harmful effects on both the generator and power system. If LOE is not correctly detected, an unnecessary trip signal may be issued, resulting in the overloading of parallel generators and even a system blackout. Conventional techniques for detecting this fault are based on impedance measurement. Despite the simple structure of these techniques, they are sometimes unable to detect some faults correctly. The presence of flexible alternating current transmission system devices can significantly affect the impedance characteristic of the system and as a result, the operation of impedance relays. In this article, first, LOE and other bugs causing failures and errors in the protection of LOE are simulated in the presence and absence of a unified power flow compensator (UPFC), and parameters with different behavior are determined. Then, the most sensitive parameters are sorted using an intelligent method based on their sensitivity. Once the sort order table is obtained, the first two parameters are applied to a ground data handling neural network method, and LOE is detected. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is significantly reliable in detecting LOE faults. Moreover, LOE is detected very quickly in the presence or absence of the UPFC in the system by preventing the tolerance of electrical and mechanical stresses by the machine and system; thus, the maloperation of the protection system is avoided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]