Sequential residual generator selection for fault detection

Structural methods in model-based fault diagnosis applications are simple and efficient tools for finding candidates for residual generation. However, the structural methods do not take model uncertainties and information about fault behavior into consideration. This may result in selecting residual generators with bad performance to be included in the diagnosis system. By using the Kullback-Leibler divergence, the performance of different residual generators can be compared to find the best one. With the ability to quantify diagnostic performance, the design of residual generators can be optimized by, for example, combining several residual generators such that the diagnostic performance is maximized. The proposed method for residual generation selection is applied to a water tank system to show that the achieved residual performance is improved compared to only use a structural method.