Quality-related prediction and monitoring of multi-mode processes using multiple PLS with application to an industrial hot strip mill

Multimode Process Monitoring Based on Modified Density Peak Clustering and Parallel Variational Autoencoder

Clustering algorithms and deep learning methods have been widely applied in the multimode process monitoring. However, for the process data with unknown mode, traditional clustering methods can hardly identify the number of modes automatically. Further, deep learning methods can learn effective features from nonlinear process data, while the extracted features cannot follow the Gaussian distribution, which may lead to incorrect control limit for fault detection. In this paper, a comprehensive monitoring method based on modified density peak clustering and parallel variational autoencoder (MDPC-PVAE) is proposed for multimode processes. Firstly, a novel clustering algorithm, named MDPC, is presented for the mode identification and division. MDPC can identify the number of modes without prior knowledge of mode information and divide the whole process data into multiple modes. Then, the PVAE is established based on distinguished multimode data to generate the deep nonlinear features, in which the generated features in each VAE follow the Gaussian distribution. Finally, the Gaussian feature representations obtained by PVAE are provided to construct the statistics H2, and the control limits are determined by the kernel density estimation (KDE) method. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated by the Tennessee Eastman process and semiconductor etching process.

Neighborhood component analysis for modeling papermaking wastewater treatment processes

It is of great importance to obtain accurate effluent quality indices in time for pulping and papermaking wastewater treatment processes. However, considering the complex characteristics of industrial wastewater treatment systems, conventional modeling methods such as partial least squares (PLS) and artificial neural networks (ANN) cannot achieve satisfactory prediction accuracy. As a supervised metric learning method, neighborhood component analysis (NCA) is able to significantly improve the prediction performance by training an appropriate model in metric space using the distance between samples for papermaking wastewater treatment processes. The results on two data sets show that NCA has a higher prediction accuracy compared with PLS and ANN. Specifically, NCA has the highest determination coefficient (R²) and the lowest root mean square error in a benchmark simulation data set. On the other hand, the results on the data from an industrial wastewater process indicate that NCA has better modeling accuracy and its R² increases by 32.80% and 29.08% compared with PLS and ANN, respectively. NCA provides a feasible way to realize online monitoring and automatic control in wastewater treatment processes.

Student's-t Mixture Regression-Based Robust Soft Sensor Development for Multimode Industrial Processes

Because of multiple manufacturing phases or operating conditions, a great many industrial processes work with multiple modes. In addition, it is inevitable that some measurements of industrial variables obtained through hardware sensors are incorrectly observed, recorded or imported into databases, resulting in the dataset available for statistic analysis being contaminated by outliers. Unfortunately, these outliers are difficult to recognize and remove completely. These process characteristics and dataset imperfections impose challenges on developing high-accuracy soft sensors. To resolve this problem, the Student's-t mixture regression (SMR) is proposed to develop a robust soft sensor for multimode industrial processes. In the SMR, for each mixing component, the Student's-t distribution is used instead of the Gaussian distribution to model secondary variables, and the functional relationship between secondary and primary variables is explicitly considered. Based on the model structure of the SMR, a computationally efficient parameter-learning algorithm is also developed for SMR. Results conducted on two cases including a numerical example and a real-life industrial process demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach.