A novel process monitoring approach based on variational recurrent autoencoder. (4th October 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Cheng, Feifan; He, Q. Peter; Zhao, Jinsong
• Is Part Of: Computers & chemical engineering. Volume 129(2019)
• Publication Date: 2019-10-04
• Subjects: Process monitoring -- Fault detection -- Nonlinearity -- Dynamics -- Variational recurrent autoencoder -- Alarm management; Chemical engineering -- Data processing -- Periodicals; 660.0285
• DOI: 10.1016/j.compchemeng.2019.106515
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0098-1354

Abstract

Abstract: Modern manufacturing plants demand not only more intelligent but also safer and more reliable process monitoring systems. With large number of variables measured and stored, significant progress has been made in the past decade on data-driven process monitoring methods and many of them have been successfully applied to monitor various processes. In this work, a new process monitoring method based on variational recurrent autoencoder (VRAE) is proposed. Different from the traditional multivariate statistical process monitoring methods, the proposed method monitors the process in probability space, which enables it to handle process nonlinearity. The proposed method also handles process dynamics through the utilization of recurrent neural network (RNN), which takes the temporal dependency between variables into account. The negative variational score (NVS) is proposed as the monitoring metric. The performance of the proposed method is compared to traditional methods and other neural network based methods on a simple nonlinear simulation and the benchmark simulated Tennessee Eastman process.