New hierarchical approach for multiple sensor fault detection and isolation. Application to an air quality monitoring network

Our work is devoted to the problem of multiple sensor fault detection and isolation using principal component analysis. Structured residuals are used for multiple fault isolation. These structured residuals are based on the principle of variable reconstruction. However, multiple fault isolation based on reconstruction approach leads to an explosion of the reconstruction combinations. Therefore instead of considering all the subsets of faulty variables, we determine the isolable multiple faults by removing the subsets of variables that have too high minimum fault amplitudes to ensure fault isolation. Unfortunately, in the case of a large number of variables, this scheme yet leads to an explosion of faulty scenarios to consider. An effective approach is to use multi-block reconstruction approach where the process variables are partitioned into several blocks. In the first step of this hierarchical approach, the goal is to isolate faulty blocks and then in the second step, from the faulty blocks, faulty variables have to be isolated. The proposed approach is successfully applied to multiple sensor fault detection and isolation of an air quality monitoring network.