Process Monitoring and Data Mining with Chemical Process Historical Databases

Modern chemical plants have distributed control systems (DCS) that handle normal operations and quality control. However, the DCS cannot compensate for fault events such as fouling or equipment failures. When faults occur, human operators must rapidly assess the situation, determine causes, and take corrective action, a challenging task further complicated by the sheer number of sensors. This information overload as well as measurement noise can hide information critical to diagnosing and fixing faults. Process monitoring algorithms can highlight key trends in data and detect faults faster, reducing or even preventing the damage that faults can cause. This research improves tools for process monitoring on different chemical processes. Previously successful monitoring methods based on statistics can fail on non-linear processes and processes with multiple operating states. To address these challenges, we develop a process monitoring technique based on multiple self-organizing maps (MSOM) and apply it in industrial case studies including a simulated plant and a batch reactor. We also use standard SOM to detect a novel event in a separation tower and produce contribution plots which help isolate the causes of the event. Another key challenge to any engineer designing a process monitoring system is that implementing most algorithms requires data organized into “normal” and “faulty”; however, data from faulty operations can be difficult to locate in databases storing months or years of operations. To assist in identifying faulty data, we apply data mining algorithms from computer science and compare how they cluster chemical process data from normal and faulty conditions. We identify several techniques which successfully duplicated normal and faulty labels from expert knowledge and introduce a process data mining software tool to make analysis simpler for practitioners. The research in this dissertation enhances chemical process monitoring tasks. MSOM-based process monitoring improves upon standard process monitoring algorithms in fault identification and diagnosis tasks. The data mining research reduces a crucial barrier to the implementation of monitoring algorithms. The enhanced monitoring introduced can help engineers develop effective and scalable process monitoring systems to improve plant safety and reduce losses from fault events

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

Nonlinear data driven techniques for process monitoring

The goal of this research is to develop process monitoring technology capable of taking advantage of the large stores of data accumulating in modern chemical plants. There is demand for new techniques for the monitoring of non-linear topology and behavior, and this research presents a topological preservation method for process monitoring using Self Organizing Maps (SOM). The novel architecture presented adapts SOM to a full spectrum of process monitoring tasks including fault detection, fault identification, fault diagnosis, and soft sensing. The key innovation of the new technique is its use of multiple SOM (MSOM) in the data modeling process as well as the use of a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to model the probability density function of classes of data. For comparison, a linear process monitoring technique based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is also used to demonstrate the improvements SOM offers. Data for the computational experiments was generated using a simulation of the Tennessee Eastman process (TEP) created in Simulink by (Ricker 1996). Previous studies focus on step changes from normal operations, but this work adds operating regimes with time dependent dynamics not previously considered with a SOM. Results show that MSOM improves upon both linear PCA as well as the standard SOM technique using one map for fault diagnosis, and also shows a superior ability to isolate which variables in the data are responsible for the faulty condition. With respect to soft sensing, SOM and MSOM modeled the compositions equally well, showing that no information was lost in dividing the map representation of process data. Future research will attempt to validate the technique on a real chemical process

매개분포근사를 통한 공정시스템 공학에서의 확률기계학습 접근법

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 화학생물공학부, 2021.8. 이종민.With the rapid development of measurement technology, higher quality and vast amounts of process data become available. Nevertheless, process data are ‘scarce’ in many cases as they are sampled only at certain operating conditions while the dimensionality of the system is large. Furthermore, the process data are inherently stochastic due to the internal characteristics of the system or the measurement noises. For this reason, uncertainty is inevitable in process systems, and estimating it becomes a crucial part of engineering tasks as the prediction errors can lead to misguided decisions and cause severe casualties or economic losses. A popular approach to this is applying probabilistic inference techniques that can model the uncertainty in terms of probability. However, most of the existing probabilistic inference techniques are based on recursive sampling, which makes it difficult to use them for industrial applications that require processing a high-dimensional and massive amount of data. To address such an issue, this thesis proposes probabilistic machine learning approaches based on parametric distribution approximation, which can model the uncertainty of the system and circumvent the computational complexity as well. The proposed approach is applied for three major process engineering tasks: process monitoring, system modeling, and process design. First, a process monitoring framework is proposed that utilizes a probabilistic classifier for fault classification. To enhance the accuracy of the classifier and reduce the computational cost for its training, a feature extraction method called probabilistic manifold learning is developed and applied to the process data ahead of the fault classification. We demonstrate that this manifold approximation process not only reduces the dimensionality of the data but also casts the data into a clustered structure, making the classifier have a low dependency on the type and dimension of the data. By exploiting this property, non-metric information (e.g., fault labels) of the data is effectively incorporated and the diagnosis performance is drastically improved. Second, a probabilistic modeling approach based on Bayesian neural networks is proposed. The parameters of deep neural networks are transformed into Gaussian distributions and trained using variational inference. The redundancy of the parameter is autonomously inferred during the model training, and insignificant parameters are eliminated a posteriori. Through a verification study, we demonstrate that the proposed approach can not only produce high-fidelity models that describe the stochastic behaviors of the system but also produce the optimal model structure. Finally, a novel process design framework is proposed based on reinforcement learning. Unlike the conventional optimization methods that recursively evaluate the objective function to find an optimal value, the proposed method approximates the objective function surface by parametric probabilistic distributions. This allows learning the continuous action policy without introducing any cumbersome discretization process. Moreover, the probabilistic policy gives means for effective control of the exploration and exploitation rates according to the certainty information. We demonstrate that the proposed framework can learn process design heuristics during the solution process and use them to solve similar design problems.계측기술의 발달로 양질의, 그리고 방대한 양의 공정 데이터의 취득이 가능해졌다. 그러나 많은 경우 시스템 차원의 크기에 비해서 일부 운전조건의 공정 데이터만이 취득되기 때문에, 공정 데이터는 ‘희소’하게 된다. 뿐만 아니라, 공정 데이터는 시스템 거동 자체와 더불어 계측에서 발생하는 노이즈로 인한 본질적인 확률적 거동을 보인다. 따라서 시스템의 예측모델은 예측 값에 대한 불확실성을 정량적으로 기술하는 것이 요구되며, 이를 통해 오진을 예방하고 잠재적 인명 피해와 경제적 손실을 방지할 수 있다. 이에 대한 보편적인 접근법은 확률추정기법을 사용하여 이러한 불확실성을 정량화 하는 것이나, 현존하는 추정기법들은 재귀적 샘플링에 의존하는 특성상 고차원이면서도 다량인 공정데이터에 적용하기 어렵다는 근본적인 한계를 가진다. 본 학위논문에서는 매개분포근사에 기반한 확률기계학습을 적용하여 시스템에 내재된 불확실성을 모델링하면서도 동시에 계산 효율적인 접근 방법을 제안하였다. 먼저, 공정의 모니터링에 있어 가우시안 혼합 모델 (Gaussian mixture model)을 분류자로 사용하는 확률적 결함 분류 프레임워크가 제안되었다. 이때 분류자의 학습에서의 계산 복잡도를 줄이기 위하여 데이터를 저차원으로 투영시키는데, 이를 위한 확률적 다양체 학습 (probabilistic manifold learn-ing) 방법이 제안되었다. 제안하는 방법은 데이터의 다양체 (manifold)를 근사하여 데이터 포인트 사이의 쌍별 우도 (pairwise likelihood)를 보존하는 투영법이 사용된다. 이를 통하여 데이터의 종류와 차원에 의존도가 낮은 진단 결과를 얻음과 동시에 데이터 레이블과 같은 비거리적 (non-metric) 정보를 효율적으로 사용하여 결함 진단 능력을 향상시킬 수 있음을 보였다. 둘째로, 베이지안 심층 신경망(Bayesian deep neural networks)을 사용한 공정의 확률적 모델링 방법론이 제시되었다. 신경망의 각 매개변수는 가우스 분포로 치환되며, 변분추론 (variational inference)을 통하여 계산 효율적인 훈련이 진행된다. 훈련이 끝난 후 파라미터의 유효성을 측정하여 불필요한 매개변수를 소거하는 사후 모델 압축 방법이 사용되었다. 반도체 공정에 대한 사례 연구는 제안하는 방법이 공정의 복잡한 거동을 효과적으로 모델링 할 뿐만 아니라 모델의 최적 구조를 도출할 수 있음을 보여준다. 마지막으로, 분포형 심층 신경망을 사용한 강화학습을 기반으로 한 확률적 공정 설계 프레임워크가 제안되었다. 최적치를 찾기 위해 재귀적으로 목적 함수 값을 평가하는 기존의 최적화 방법론과 달리, 목적 함수 곡면 (objective function surface)을 매개화 된 확률분포로 근사하는 접근법이 제시되었다. 이를 기반으로 이산화 (discretization)를 사용하지 않고 연속적 행동 정책을 학습하며, 확실성 (certainty)에 기반한 탐색 (exploration) 및 활용 (exploi-tation) 비율의 제어가 효율적으로 이루어진다. 사례 연구 결과는 공정의 설계에 대한 경험지식 (heuristic)을 학습하고 유사한 설계 문제의 해를 구하는 데 이용할 수 있음을 보여준다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1. Motivation 1 1.2. Outline of the thesis 5 Chapter 2 Backgrounds and preliminaries 9 2.1. Bayesian inference 9 2.2. Monte Carlo 10 2.3. Kullback-Leibler divergence 11 2.4. Variational inference 12 2.5. Riemannian manifold 13 2.6. Finite extended-pseudo-metric space 16 2.7. Reinforcement learning 16 2.8. Directed graph 19 Chapter 3 Process monitoring and fault classification with probabilistic manifold learning 20 3.1. Introduction 20 3.2. Methods 25 3.2.1. Uniform manifold approximation 27 3.2.2. Clusterization 28 3.2.3. Projection 31 3.2.4. Mapping of unknown data query 32 3.2.5. Inference 33 3.3. Verification study 38 3.3.1. Dataset description 38 3.3.2. Experimental setup 40 3.3.3. Process monitoring 43 3.3.4. Projection characteristics 47 3.3.5. Fault diagnosis 50 3.3.6. Computational Aspects 56 Chapter 4 Process system modeling with Bayesian neural networks 59 4.1. Introduction 59 4.2. Methods 63 4.2.1. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) 63 4.2.2. Bayesian LSTM (BLSTM) 66 4.3. Verification study 68 4.3.1. System description 68 4.3.2. Estimation of the plasma variables 71 4.3.3. Dataset description 72 4.3.4. Experimental setup 72 4.3.5. Weight regularization during training 78 4.3.6. Modeling complex behaviors of the system 80 4.3.7. Uncertainty quantification and model compression 85 Chapter 5 Process design based on reinforcement learning with distributional actor-critic networks 89 5.1. Introduction 89 5.2. Methods 93 5.2.1. Flowsheet hashing 93 5.2.2. Behavioral cloning 99 5.2.3. Neural Monte Carlo tree search (N-MCTS) 100 5.2.4. Distributional actor-critic networks (DACN) 105 5.2.5. Action masking 110 5.3. Verification study 110 5.3.1. System description 110 5.3.2. Experimental setup 111 5.3.3. Result and discussions 115 Chapter 6 Concluding remarks 120 6.1. Summary of the contributions 120 6.2. Future works 122 Appendix 125 A.1. Proof of Lemma 1 125 A.2. Performance indices for dimension reduction 127 A.3. Model equations for process units 130 Bibliography 132 초 록 149박

Sensor Fault Detection and Isolation System

The purpose of this research is to develop a Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) system which is capable to diagnosis multiple sensor faults in nonlinear cases. In order to lead this study closer to real world applications in oil industries, the system parameters of the applied system are assumed to be unknown. In the first step of the proposed method, phase space reconstruction techniques are used to reconstruct the phase space of the applied system. This step is aimed to infer the system property by the collected sensor measurements. The second step is to use the reconstructed phase space to predict future sensor measurements, and residual signals are generated by comparing the actually measured measurements to the predicted measurements. Since, in practice, residual signals will not perfectly equal to zero in the fault-free situation, Multiple Hypothesis Shiryayev Sequential Probability Test (MHSSPT) is introduced to further process those residual signals, and the diagnostic results are presented in probability. In addition, the proposed method is extended to a non-stationary case by using the conservation/dissipation property in phase space. The proposed method is examined by both of simulated data and real process data to support that it is capable of detecting and isolating multiple sensor faults in nonlinear cases. In the section of simulation results, a three tank model is introduced for generating simulated data. The three tank model is modeled according to a nonlinear laboratory setup DTS200. On the other hand, in the section of experimental results, the real process data collected from a sugar factory actuator system are used to examine the proposed method. According to our results obtained from simulations and experiments, the proposed method is capable to indicate both of healthy and faulty situations. These results further confirm that the proposed method is able to deal with not only simulated data but also real process data

Intelligent Condition Monitoring of Industrial Plants: An Overview of Methodologies and Uncertainty Management Strategies

Condition monitoring plays a significant role in the safety and reliability of modern industrial systems. Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches are gaining attention from academia and industry as a growing subject in industrial applications and as a powerful way of identifying faults. This paper provides an overview of intelligent condition monitoring and fault detection and diagnosis methods for industrial plants with a focus on the open-source benchmark Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP). In this survey, the most popular and state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) algorithms for industrial plant condition monitoring, fault detection, and diagnosis are summarized and the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm are studied. Challenges like imbalanced data, unlabelled samples and how deep learning models can handle them are also covered. Finally, a comparison of the accuracies and specifications of different algorithms utilizing the Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP) is conducted. This research will be beneficial for both researchers who are new to the field and experts, as it covers the literature on condition monitoring and state-of-the-art methods alongside the challenges and possible solutions to them

Advanced and novel modeling techniques for simulation, optimization and monitoring chemical engineering tasks with refinery and petrochemical unit applications

Engineers predict, optimize, and monitor processes to improve safety and profitability. Models automate these tasks and determine precise solutions. This research studies and applies advanced and novel modeling techniques to automate and aid engineering decision-making. Advancements in computational ability have improved modeling software’s ability to mimic industrial problems. Simulations are increasingly used to explore new operating regimes and design new processes. In this work, we present a methodology for creating structured mathematical models, useful tips to simplify models, and a novel repair method to improve convergence by populating quality initial conditions for the simulation’s solver. A crude oil refinery application is presented including simulation, simplification tips, and the repair strategy implementation. A crude oil scheduling problem is also presented which can be integrated with production unit models. Recently, stochastic global optimization (SGO) has shown to have success of finding global optima to complex nonlinear processes. When performing SGO on simulations, model convergence can become an issue. The computational load can be decreased by 1) simplifying the model and 2) finding a synergy between the model solver repair strategy and optimization routine by using the initial conditions formulated as points to perturb the neighborhood being searched. Here, a simplifying technique to merging the crude oil scheduling problem and the vertically integrated online refinery production optimization is demonstrated. To optimize the refinery production a stochastic global optimization technique is employed. Process monitoring has been vastly enhanced through a data-driven modeling technique Principle Component Analysis. As opposed to first-principle models, which make assumptions about the structure of the model describing the process, data-driven techniques make no assumptions about the underlying relationships. Data-driven techniques search for a projection that displays data into a space easier to analyze. Feature extraction techniques, commonly dimensionality reduction techniques, have been explored fervidly to better capture nonlinear relationships. These techniques can extend data-driven modeling’s process-monitoring use to nonlinear processes. Here, we employ a novel nonlinear process-monitoring scheme, which utilizes Self-Organizing Maps. The novel techniques and implementation methodology are applied and implemented to a publically studied Tennessee Eastman Process and an industrial polymerization unit

A Machine Learning-based Distributed System for Fault Diagnosis with Scalable Detection Quality in Industrial IoT

In this paper, a methodology based on machine learning for fault detection in continuous processes is presented. It aims to monitor fully distributed scenarios, such as the Tennessee Eastman Process, selected as the use case of this work, where sensors are distributed throughout an industrial plant. A hybrid feature selection approach based on filters and wrappers, called Hybrid Fisher Wrapper method, is proposed to select the most representative sensors to get the highest detection quality for fault identification. The proposed methodology provides a complete design space of solutions differing in the sensing effort, the processing complexity, and the obtained detection quality. It constitutes an alternative to the typical scheme in Industry 4.0, where multiple distributed sensor systems collect and send data to a centralised cloud. Differently, the proposed technique follows a distributed approach, in which processing can be done eventually close to the sensors where data is generated, i.e., at the edge of the Internet of Things. This approach overcomes the bandwidth, privacy, and latency limitations that centralised approaches may suffer. The experimental results show that the proposed methodology provides Tennessee Eastman Process fault detection solutions with state-of-the-art detection quality figures. In terms of latency, solutions obtained outperform in 37.5 times the implementation with the highest detection quality, using 1.99 times fewer features, on average. Also, the scalability of the framework provides a design space where the optimal implementation can be chosen according to the application needs