Data-driven Soft Sensors in the Process Industry

In the last two decades Soft Sensors established themselves as a valuable alternative to the traditional means for the acquisition of critical process variables, process monitoring and other tasks which are related to process control. This paper discusses characteristics of the process industry data which are critical for the development of data-driven Soft Sensors. These characteristics are common to a large number of process industry fields, like the chemical industry, bioprocess industry, steel industry, etc. The focus of this work is put on the data-driven Soft Sensors because of their growing popularity, already demonstrated usefulness and huge, though yet not completely realised, potential. A comprehensive selection of case studies covering the three most important Soft Sensor application fields, a general introduction to the most popular Soft Sensor modelling techniques as well as a discussion of some open issues in the Soft Sensor development and maintenance and their possible solutions are the main contributions of this work

Wind turbine condition monitoring strategy through multiway PCA and multivariate inference

This article states a condition monitoring strategy for wind turbines using a statistical data-driven modeling approach by means of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data. Initially, a baseline data-based model is obtained from the healthy wind turbine by means of multiway principal component analysis (MPCA). Then, when the wind turbine is monitorized, new data is acquired and projected into the baseline MPCA model space. The acquired SCADA data are treated as a random process given the random nature of the turbulent wind. The objective is to decide if the multivariate distribution that is obtained from the wind turbine to be analyzed (healthy or not) is related to the baseline one. To achieve this goal, a test for the equality of population means is performed. Finally, the results of the test can determine that the hypothesis is rejected (and the wind turbine is faulty) or that there is no evidence to suggest that the two means are different, so the wind turbine can be considered as healthy. The methodology is evaluated on a wind turbine fault detection benchmark that uses a 5 MW high-fidelity wind turbine model and a set of eight realistic fault scenarios. It is noteworthy that the results, for the presented methodology, show that for a wide range of significance, a in [1%, 13%], the percentage of correct decisions is kept at 100%; thus it is a promising tool for real-time wind turbine condition monitoring.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Variable grouping in multivariate time series via correlation

The decomposition of high-dimensional multivariate time series (MTS) into a number of low-dimensional MTS is a useful but challenging task because the number of possible dependencies between variables is likely to be huge. This paper is about a systematic study of the “variable groupings” problem in MTS. In particular, we investigate different methods of utilizing the information regarding correlations among MTS variables. This type of method does not appear to have been studied before. In all, 15 methods are suggested and applied to six datasets where there are identifiable mixed groupings of MTS variables. This paper describes the general methodology, reports extensive experimental results, and concludes with useful insights on the strength and weakness of this type of grouping metho

Fuzzy sets in nonparametric Bayes regression

A simple Bayesian approach to nonparametric regression is described using fuzzy sets and membership functions. Membership functions are interpreted as likelihood functions for the unknown regression function, so that with the help of a reference prior they can be transformed to prior density functions. The unknown regression function is decomposed into wavelets and a hierarchical Bayesian approach is employed for making inferences on the resulting wavelet coefficients.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/074921708000000084 the IMS Collections (http://www.imstat.org/publications/imscollections.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org