Statistical Process Monitoring Using Advanced Data-Driven and Deep Learning Approaches: Theory and Practical Applications

book.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract

With today's competitive automation environment, demands for efficiency, safety, and high productivity are continuously increasing. Thus, process monitoring is vital for maintaining the desired process performance and specifications. Process monitoring aims to detect potential anomalies that can occur in a monitored process and identify their potential sources. This chapter provides an overview of process monitoring methods. To begin, we present the motivation for using process monitoring, followed by an introduction and a reminder of some of the key definitions, fundamental concepts, and terminology that are used throughout this chapter. We also briefly explain the distinction between different types of faults, such as drift, abrupt, and intermittent faults. In the following section, we discuss the different monitoring methods including model-, knowledge-, and data-based techniques. Finally, we describe the most commonly used metrics for the evaluation of the performance of the different fault detection approaches.

Keywords

Fault detection and isolation; Data-based; Model-based; Supervised and unsupervised methods; Process monitoring

1.1 Introduction

1.1.1 Motivation: why process monitoring

Recent decades have witnessed a huge growth in new technologies and advancements in instrumentation, industrial systems, and environmental processes, which are becoming increasingly complex. Diagnostic operation has become an essential element of these processes and systems to ensure their operational reliability and availability. In an environment where productivity and safety are paramount, failing to detect anomalies in a process can lead to harmful effects to a plant's productivity, profitability, and safety. Several serious accidents have happened in the past few decades in various industrial plants across the world, including the Bhopal gas tragedy [1,2], the Piper Alpha explosion [3,4], the accidents at the Mina al-Ahmadi Kuwait refinery [5] and two photovoltaic plants in the US burned in 2009 and 2011 (a 383 KWp PV array in Bakersfield, CA and a 1.208 MWp power plant in Mount Holly, NC, respectively) [6]. The Bhopal accident, also referred to as the Bhopal gas disaster, was a gas leak accident at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in India in 1984 that resulted in over 3000 deaths and over 400,000 others gravely injured in the local area around the plant [1,2]. The explosion of the Piper Alpha oil production platform, which is located in the North Sea and managed by Occidental Petroleum, caused 167 deaths and a financial loss of around $3.4 billion [3,4]. In 2000, an explosion occurred in the Mina Al-Ahmadi oil refinery in Kuwait, killing five people and causing serious damage to the plant. The explosion was caused by a defect in a condensate line in a refinery. Nimmo [7] has estimated that the petrochemical industry in the USA can avoid losing up to $20 billion per year if anomalies in inspected processes could be discovered in time. In safety-critical systems such as nuclear reactors and aircrafts, undetected faults may lead to catastrophic accidents. For example, the pilot of the American Airlines DC10 that crashed at Chicago O'Hare International Airport was notified of a fault only 15 seconds before the accident happened, giving the pilot too little time to react; this crash could easily have been avoided according to [8]. Recently, the Fukushima accident of 2011 in Japan highlighted the importance of developing accurate and efficient monitoring systems for nuclear plants. Essentially, monitoring of industrial processes represents the backbone for ensuring the safe operation of these processes and to ensure that the process is always functioning properly.

1.1.2 Types of faults

Generally speaking, three main subsystems are merged to form a plant or system: sensors, actuators, and the main process itself. These systems' components are permanently exposed to faults caused by many factors, such as aging, manufacturing, and severe operating conditions. A fault or anomaly is a tolerable deviation of a characteristic property of a variable from its acceptable behavior that could lead to a failure in the system if it is not detected early enough so that the necessary correction can be performed [9]. Conventionally, a fault, if it is not detected in time, could progress to produce a failure or malfunction. Note that there is a distinction between failure and malfunction; this distinction is important. A malfunction can be defined as an intermittent deviation of the accomplishment of a process's intended function [10], whereas failure is a persistent suspension of a process's capability to perform a demanded function within indicated operating conditions [10].

In industrial processes, a fault or an abnormal event is defined as the departure of a calculated process variable from its acceptable region of operation. The underlying causes of a fault can be malfunctions or changes in sensor, actuator, or process components:

•  Process faults or structural changes. Structural change usually takes place within the process itself due to a hard failure of the equipment. The information flow between the different variables is affected because of these changes. Failure of a central controller, a broken or leaking pipe, and a stuck valve are a few examples of process faults. These faults are distinguished by slow changes across various variables in the process.

•  Faults in sensors and actuators. Sensors and actuators play a very important role in the functioning of any industrial process since they provide feedback signals that are crucial for the control of the plant. Actuators are essential for transforming control inputs into appropriate actuation signals (e.g., forces and torques needed for system operation). Generally, actuator faults may lead to higher power consumption or even a total loss of control [11]. Faults in pumps and motors are examples of actuator faults. On the other hand, sensor-based errors include positive or negative bias errors, out of range errors, precision degradation error, and drift sensor error. Sensor faults are generally characterized by quick deviations in a few numbers of process variables. Fig. 1.1 shows examples of the most commonly occurring sensor faults: bias, drift, degradation, and sensor freezing.

Figure 1.1 Commonly occurring sensor faults. (A) Bias sensor fault. (B) Drift sensor fault. (C) Degradation sensor fault. (D) Freezing sensor fault.

We can also find in the literature another type of anomaly called gross parameter changes in a model. Indeed, parameter failure occurs when there is a disturbance entering the monitored process from the environment through one or more variables. Some common examples of such malfunctions include a change in the heat transfer coefficient, a change in the temperature coefficient in a heat exchanger, a change in the liquid flow rate, or a change in the concentration of a reactant.

Thus, sensor or process faults can affect the normal functioning of a process plant. In today's highly competitive industrial environment, improved monitoring of processes is an important step towards increasing the efficiency of production facilities.

In practice, there is a tendency to classify anomalies according to their time-variant behavior. Fig. 1.2 illustrates three commonly occurring types of anomalies that can be distinguished by their time-variant form: abrupt, incipient, and intermittent faults. Abrupt anomalies happen regularly in real systems and are generally typified by a sudden change in a variable from its normal operating range (Fig. 1.2A). The faulty measurement can be formally expressed as

(1.1)

where F .

Figure 1.2 Fault types. (A) Abrupt anomaly. (B) Gradual anomaly. (C) Intermittent anomaly.

The drift anomaly type can be caused by the aging or degradation of a sensor and can be viewed as a linear change of the magnitude of fault in time. Here, the measurement corrupted with a drift fault is modeled as

(1.2)

where θ is the start time of the occurred fault. Finally, intermittent faults are faults characterized by discontinuous occurrence in time; they occur and disappear repeatedly (Fig. 1.2C).

Generally, industrial and environmental processes are exposed to various types of faults that negatively affect their productivity and efficiency. According to the form in which the fault is introduced, faults can be further classified as additive and multiplicative faults. On the other hand, a multiplicative fault influences a measurable variable Y by the product of another variable U is the input variable.

1.1.3 Process monitoring

Before automation became commonplace in the field of process monitoring, human operators carried out important control tasks in managing process plants. However, the complete reliance on human operators to cope with abnormal events and emergencies has become increasingly difficult because of the complexity and a large number of variables in modern process plants. Considering such difficult conditions, it is understandable that human operators tend to make mistakes that can lead to significant economic, safety, and environmental problems. Thanks to advancements in technology over recent years, automation of process fault detection and isolation has been a major milestone in automatic process monitoring. Automatic process monitoring has been shown to respond very well to abnormal events in a process plant with much fewer mistakes compared to fault management by human operators.

The demand for a monitoring system that is capable of appropriately detecting abnormal changes (sensor or process faults) has attracted the attention of researchers from different fields. The detection and isolation of anomalies that may occur in a monitored system are the two main elements of process monitoring (Fig. 1.3). The purpose of the detection step is to detect abnormal changes that affect the behavior of the monitored system. Once the anomaly is detected, effective system operation also requires evaluation of the risk of a system shutdown, followed by fault isolation or correction before the anomaly contaminates the process performance [12,13]. The purpose of fault isolation is to determine the source responsible for the occurring anomalies, i.e., to determine which sensor or process component is faulty. In practice, sometimes it is also essential to assess the severity of the occurred fault, which is done by the fault identification step. Here, we will focus only on fault detection and isolation.

Figure 1.3 Steps of process monitoring.

There are two types of anomaly detection:

•  Online fault detection. The objective of online anomaly detection is to set up a decision rule capable of detecting, as quickly as possible, the transition from a normal operating state to an abnormal operating state. Online detection is based on the idea that system evolution is considered a succession of stationary modes separated by fast transitions.

•  Offline fault detection. The purpose of offline fault detection is to detect the presence of a possible anomaly outside the use of the monitored system. The system is observed for a finite period (the system is in stationary mode), and then, based on these observations, a decision is made on the state of the monitored system. Offline detection methods rely on an observation number fixed a priori, where the observations also come from the same law.

1.1.4 Physical redundancy vs analytical redundancy

Process monitoring is essentially based on the exploitation of redundant sources of information. There are two types of redundancy in the process: physical redundancy and analytical redundancy (Fig. 1.4A–B). The essence of hardware or physical redundancy, which is a traditional method in process monitoring, consists of measuring a particular process variable using several sensors (e.g., two or more sensors). To detect and isolate simple faults, the number of sensors to use should be doubled. Specifically, under normal conditions, one sensor is sufficient to monitor a particular variable, but adding at least two extra sensors is generally needed to guarantee reliable measurements and monitoring under faulty conditions. Typically, fault detection and isolation are achieved by a majority vote between all the redundant sensors. This strategy has been widely used in the industry because of its reliability and simplicity of implementation. In practice, the main disadvantage of hardware redundancy is the additional cost of equipment and maintenance, as well as the space needed to install the equipment that increases complexity considerably in the already very complex systems. In addition, this method is limited in practice to sensor faults and cannot detect faults in variables that are not measured directly. This approach is mainly only justified for critical systems, such as nuclear reactors and aeronautic systems. Unlike a physical redundancy, which is performed by adding more sensors (hardware) to measure a specific process variable, the analytical redundancy does not require additional hardware because it is based on using the existing relations between the dependent measured variables that are or are not of the same nature. Analytical redundancy is a more accessible strategy that compares the measured variable with the predicted values from a mathematical model of the monitored system. It thereby exploits redundant analytical relationships among various measured variables of the monitored process and avoids replicating every hardware separately.

Figure 1.4 Conceptual representation of (A) physical and (B) analytical redundancy.

1.2 Process monitoring methods

Today, engineering and environmental processes have become far more complex due to advances in technology. Anomaly detection and isolation have become necessary to monitor the continuity and proper functioning of modern industrial systems and environmental processes. Depending on the field of application, the repercussions of anomalies become binding and harmful if it concerns human safety, such as in aeronautical systems and nuclear reactors. Advancements in the field of process control and automation over the last few years have yielded various methods for successful diagnosis and detection of abnormal events. To meet safety and productivity requirements, extensive theoretical and practical monitoring methods have been developed. These methods are generally divided into three families of approaches, depending on the nature of the knowledge available on the system: model-, knowledge-, and data-based methods. A thorough overview of process fault detection and diagnosis can be found in [5]. Fig. 1.5 shows a summary of various monitoring methods; this section presents a brief overview of these monitoring techniques.

Figure 1.5 A summary of various fault detection approaches.

1.2.1 Model-based methods

Over the past three decades, numerous monitoring methods to improve the safety and productivity of several environmental and engineering processes have emerged. Model-based methods have proven especially useful in industrial applications where keeping the desired performance is highly required. A model-based method involves comparing the process's measured variables with the prediction from the mathematical model of the process. The conceptual schematic of the model-based fault detection is illustrated in are usually used to detect faults in the mean/variance of process.

Figure 1.6 Conceptual schematics of model-based process monitoring.

In summary, fault detection and isolation using model-based methods usually take place in two distinct steps:

•  The first step consists of residual generation. Ideally, these residuals must be zero in normal operation and nonzero in the presence of an anomaly. However, the presence of noise and modeling errors make the residuals fluctuate around zero. A significant divergence of the residual from zero is an indication of faults.

•  The second step concerns the evaluations of the residuals based on a decision procedure for detecting and isolating faults. This is done using statistical detection techniques such as EWMA, CUSUM, and generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) test [12].

A substantial amount of research work has been carried out on model-based monitoring methods. Methods that fall into the model-based monitoring category include parity space approaches [14–17], observer-based approaches [18,19], and interval approaches [20]. A related discussion and a comprehensive survey on model-based fault detection methods can be found in [21–23].

Essentially, the detection performance of model-based approaches is closely related to the accuracy of the reference model. The availability of an accurate model that mimics the nominal behavior of the monitored process is very helpful for facilitating the detection of faulty measurements. However, for complex processes, such as those of many industrial and environmental processes with a large number of variables, deriving and developing accurate models is not always easy and can be time-consuming, which makes them nonapplicable for many applications. For instance, modeling the inflow measurements of wastewater treatment plants is very challenging because of the presence of a large number of variables that are nonlinearly dependent and autocorrelated. Additionally, modeling modern industrial and environmental processes is challenging because of the complexity and the absence of a precise understanding of these processes. The successful detection of faults using model-based approaches can, therefore, be considered a challenging and unsuitable approach. Alternatively, data-based methods are more commonly used.

1.2.2 Knowledge-based methods

The success of modern industrial systems relies on their proper and safe operation. Early detection of anomalies as they emerge in the inspected process is essential for avoiding extensive damage and reducing the downtime needed for reparation [24]. As discussed above, when the information available to understand the process under fault-free operation is insufficient to construct an accurate analytical model, analytical monitoring methods are no longer effective. Knowledge-based methods present an alternative solution to bypass this difficulty. In the following, we use artificial intelligence methods and available historical measurements, which inherently represent the correlation of the process variables, to extract the underlying knowledge and system characteristics. In other words, we utilize process characteristic values, such as variance, magnitude, and state variables, for extracting features under fault-free and faulty conditions based on heuristic and analytical knowledge. Fault detection is then performed in a heuristic manner. Specifically, the actual features from the online data are compared with the obtained under-lying knowledge. Methods that fall in this category include expert systems [25], fuzzy logic, Hazop-digraph (HDG) [5], possible cause and effect graphs (PCEG) [26], neuro-fuzzy based causal analysis, failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) [27], and Bayesian networks [28]. The major drawback of these techniques is that they are more appropriate for small-scale systems and thus may not be suited to inspect modern systems.

1.2.3 Data-based monitoring methods

Engineering and environmental processes have undoubtedly become far more complex due to advances in technology. Consequently, designing an accurate model for complex, high dimensional and nonlinear systems has also become very challenging, expensive, and time-consuming to develop. Setting simplifications and assumptions on models leads to limits in their capacity to capture certain relevant features and operation modes, and induces a modeling bias that significantly degrades the efficiency of the monitoring system. In the absence of a physics-based process model, data-driven statistical techniques for process monitoring have proved themselves in practice over the past four decades. Indeed, data-based implicit models only require an available process-data resource for process monitoring [5]. Data-based monitoring techniques are mainly based on statistical control charts and machine-learning methods.

Essentially, these monitoring techniques rely on historical data collected from the monitoring system. The system is modeled as a black box with input and output data (Fig. 1.7). At first, a reference empirical model that mimics the nominal behavior of the inspected process is constructed using the fault-free data, and then this model is used for detecting faults in new data. In contrast to model-based methods, only historic process data is required to be available in the data-based fault detection methods, and they are classified into two classes: qualitative and quantitative methods.

Figure 1.7 Data-based methods.

Unsupervised data-based techniques for fault detection and isolation do not use any prior information on faults affecting the process. Unsupervised data-based techniques cover a set of methods for monitoring industrial processes through tools such as statistical control charts (see Fig. 1.8). Univariate techniques, such as a Shewhart chart, exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) [29], and cumulative sum (CUSUM), are used for monitoring only a single process variable at a given time instant. Monitoring charts have been extensively exploited in most industrial processes. CUSUM and EWMA schemes show good capacity in sensing small changes compared to the Shewhart chart. In [30], a spectral monitoring scheme is designed based on the information embedded in the coefficients of the signal Fourier. However, these conventional schemes are designed based on the hypotheses that the data are Gaussian and uncorrelated. To escape these basic assumptions, multiscale monitoring schemes using wavelets have been developed [31]. Furthermore, the above-discussed schemes use static thresholds computed using the fault-free data. Recently, several adaptive monitoring methods have been developed. These schemes are, in practice, more flexible and efficient than conventional schemes with fixed parameters. For more details, see [32–35]. These univariate monitoring schemes examine a particular variable at a time instant by assuming independence between variables. When monitoring multivariate data using several univariates, even when the number of false alarms of each scheme is small, the collective rate could be very large [36–38]. In addition, measurements from modern industrial processes are rarely independent and present a large number of process variables. Since univariate schemes ignore the cross-correlation between variables, they consequently suffer from an inflated number of undetected issues and false alarms, which makes this monitoring scheme unsuitable [36–38].

Figure 1.8 Data-based monitoring techniques.

[39], multivariate EWMA [40], and multivariate CUSUM [41]. However, the performance of these multivariate schemes degrades as the number of variables monitored increases, which makes them unsuitable for high dimensional