Distributed statistical process monitoring based on block‐wise residual generator

Abstract

The increasing scale of modern chemical plants keeps popularizing investigation as well as application of distributed process monitoring approaches. With a goal of directly quantifying the normal relations between different blocks divided from the whole process, a novel multi‐block modeling strategy called block‐wise residual generator is proposed, which trains a residual generator for each block through using the partial least squares algorithm with single one output, so that the relation between the corresponding block and the others is quantified as a regression model in a block‐wise manner. The deviations caused by the abnormal samples to the normal relations quantified for different blocks could thus be efficiently captured by the residuals generated from the block regression models, which then provide sensitive information for fault detection and contribution‐based fault diagnosis. Moreover, the proposed method is applicable for both disjoint and overlapped block divisions, and the direct consideration of individually quantifying relations between different blocks can always guarantee its salient monitoring performance, as validated through comparisons with classical distributed process monitoring methods.