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Nature-Inspired Adaptive Architecture for Soft Sensor Modelling
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Abstract
This paper gives a general overview of the challenges present in the research field of Soft Sensor
building and proposes a novel architecture for building of Soft Sensors, which copes with the identified challenges. The
architecture is inspired and making use of nature-related techniques for computational intelligence. Another aspect,
which is addressed by the proposed architecture, are the identified characteristics of the process industry data. The data
recorded in the process industry consist usually of certain amount of missing values or sample exceeding meaningful
values of the measurements, called data outliers. Other process industry data properties causing problems for the
modelling are the collinearity of the data, drifting data and the different sampling rates of the particular hardware
sensors. It is these characteristics which are the source of the need for an adaptive behaviour of Soft Sensors. The
architecture reflects this need and provides mechanisms for the adaptation and evolution of the Soft Sensor at different
levels. The adaptation capabilities are provided by maintaining a variety of rather simple models. These particular
models, called paths in terms of the architecture, can for example focus on different partition of the input data space, or
provide different adaptation speeds to changes in the data. The actual modelling techniques involved into the
architecture are data-driven computational learning approaches like artificial neural networks, principal component
regression, etc