Machine learning based adaptive soft sensor for flash point inference in a refinery realtime process

In industrial control processes, certain characteristics are sometimes difficult to measure by a physical sensor due to technical and/or economic limitations. This fact is especially true in the petrochemical industry. Some of those quantities are especially crucial for operators and process safety. This is the case for the automotive diesel Flash Point Temperature (FT). Traditional methods for FT estimation are based on the study of the empirical inference between flammability properties and the denoted target magnitude. The necessary measures are taken indirectly by samples from the process and analyzing them in the laboratory, this process implies time (can take hours from collection to flash temperature measurement) and thus make it very difficult for real-time monitorization, which in fact results in security and economical losses. This study defines a procedure based on Machine Learning modules that demonstrate the power of real-time monitorization over real data from an important international refinery. As input, easily measured values provided in real-time, such as temperature, pressure, and hydraulic flow are used and a benchmark of different regressive algorithms for FT estimation is presented. The study highlights the importance of sequencing preprocessing techniques for the correct inference of values. The implementation of adaptive learning strategies achieves considerable economic benefits in the productization of this soft sensor. The validity of the method is tested in the reality of a refinery. In addition, real-world industrial data sets tend to be unstable and volatile, and the data is often affected by noise, outliers, irrelevant or unnecessary features, and missing data. This contribution demonstrates with the inclusion of a new concept, called an adaptive soft sensor, the importance of the dynamic adaptation of the conformed schemes based on Machine Learning through their combination with feature selection, dimensional reduction, and signal processing techniques. The economic benefits of applying this soft sensor in the refinery's production plant and presented as potential semi-annual savings.This work has received funding support from the SPRI-Basque Gov- ernment through the ELKARTEK program (OILTWIN project, ref. KK- 2020/00052)

Deep Learning-Based, Passive Fault Tolerant Control Facilitated by a Taxonomy of Cyber-Attack Effects

In the interest of improving the resilience of cyber-physical control systems to better operate in the presence of various cyber-attacks and/or faults, this dissertation presents a novel controller design based on deep-learning networks. This research lays out a controller design that does not rely on fault or cyber-attack detection. Being passive, the controller’s routine operating process is to take in data from the various components of the physical system, holistically assess the state of the physical system using deep-learning networks and decide the subsequent round of commands from the controller. This use of deep-learning methods in passive fault tolerant control (FTC) is unique in the research literature. The proposed controller is applied to both linear and nonlinear systems. Additionally, the application and testing are accomplished with both actuators and sensors being affected by attacks and /or faults

Machine Learning Based Applications for Data Visualization, Modeling, Control, and Optimization for Chemical and Biological Systems

This dissertation report covers Yan Ma’s Ph.D. research with applicational studies of machine learning in manufacturing and biological systems. The research work mainly focuses on reaction modeling, optimization, and control using a deep learning-based approaches, and the work mainly concentrates on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Yan Ma’s research also involves with data mining with bioinformatics. Large-scale data obtained in RNA-seq is analyzed using non-linear dimensionality reduction with Principal Component Analysis (PCA), t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), and Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP), followed by clustering analysis using k-Means and Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering with Noise (HDBSCAN). This report focuses on 3 case studies with DRL optimization control including a polymerization reaction control with deep reinforcement learning, a bioreactor optimization, and a fed-batch reaction optimization from a reactor at Dow Inc.. In the first study, a data-driven controller based on DRL is developed for a fed-batch polymerization reaction with multiple continuous manipulative variables with continuous control. The second case study is the modeling and optimization of a bioreactor. In this study, a data-driven reaction model is developed using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to simulate the growth curve and bio-product accumulation of cyanobacteria Plectonema. Then a DRL control agent that optimizes the daily nutrient input is applied to maximize the yield of valuable bio-product C-phycocyanin. C-phycocyanin yield is increased by 52.1% compared to a control group with the same total nutrient content in experimental validation. The third case study is employing the data-driven control scheme for optimization of a reactor from Dow Inc, where a DRL-based optimization framework is established for the optimization of the Multi-Input, Multi-Output (MIMO) reaction system with reaction surrogate modeling. Yan Ma’s research overall shows promising directions for employing the emerging technologies of data-driven methods and deep learning in the field of manufacturing and biological systems. It is demonstrated that DRL is an efficient algorithm in the study of three different reaction systems with both stochastic and deterministic policies. Also, the use of data-driven models in reaction simulation also shows promising results with the non-linear nature and fast computational speed of the neural network models

Intelligent control of mobile robot with redundant manipulator & stereovision: quantum / soft computing toolkit

The task of an intelligent control system design applying soft and quantum computational intelligence technologies discussed. An example of a control object as a mobile robot with redundant robotic manipulator and stereovision introduced. Design of robust knowledge bases is performed using a developed computational intelligence – quantum / soft computing toolkit (QC/SCOptKBTM). The knowledge base self-organization process of fuzzy homogeneous regulators through the application of end-to-end IT of quantum computing described. The coordination control between the mobile robot and redundant manipulator with stereovision based on soft computing described. The general design methodology of a generalizing control unit based on the physical laws of quantum computing (quantum information-thermodynamic trade-off of control quality distribution and knowledge base self-organization goal) is considered. The modernization of the pattern recognition system based on stereo vision technology presented. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated in comparison with the structures of control systems based on soft computing for unforeseen control situations with sensor system

Cyber-Agricultural Systems for Crop Breeding and Sustainable Production

The Cyber-Agricultural System (CAS) Represents an overarching Framework of Agriculture that Leverages Recent Advances in Ubiquitous Sensing, Artificial Intelligence, Smart Actuators, and Scalable Cyberinfrastructure (CI) in Both Breeding and Production Agriculture. We Discuss the Recent Progress and Perspective of the Three Fundamental Components of CAS – Sensing, Modeling, and Actuation – and the Emerging Concept of Agricultural Digital Twins (DTs). We Also Discuss How Scalable CI is Becoming a Key Enabler of Smart Agriculture. in This Review We Shed Light on the Significance of CAS in Revolutionizing Crop Breeding and Production by Enhancing Efficiency, Productivity, Sustainability, and Resilience to Changing Climate. Finally, We Identify Underexplored and Promising Future Directions for CAS Research and Development

SensorSCAN: Self-Supervised Learning and Deep Clustering for Fault Diagnosis in Chemical Processes

Modern industrial facilities generate large volumes of raw sensor data during the production process. This data is used to monitor and control the processes and can be analyzed to detect and predict process abnormalities. Typically, the data has to be annotated by experts in order to be used in predictive modeling. However, manual annotation of large amounts of data can be difficult in industrial settings. In this paper, we propose SensorSCAN, a novel method for unsupervised fault detection and diagnosis, designed for industrial chemical process monitoring. We demonstrate our model's performance on two publicly available datasets of the Tennessee Eastman Process with various faults. The results show that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches (+0.2-0.3 TPR for a fixed FPR) and effectively detects most of the process faults without expert annotation. Moreover, we show that the model fine-tuned on a small fraction of labeled data nearly reaches the performance of a SOTA model trained on the full dataset. We also demonstrate that our method is suitable for real-world applications where the number of faults is not known in advance. The code is available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/sensorscan