Data-driven quality monitoring and fault detection for multimode nonlinear processes

This paper addresses the problem of quality monitoring and fault detection in nonlinear processes which are working in different operating points. For such processes the statistical model which is obtained from process data is different from one operating point to another, due to nonlinearities and set-point changes. Therefore the classical methods for quality monitoring and fault detection, e.g. partial least squares (PLS), may not be suitable. To this end, a new approach is proposed based on the modeling of nonlinear process as a piecewise linear parameter varying system, considering the behavior of the plant in each operating point as linear time invariant with different parameters in each operating point. The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used to model the process as a finite mixture of Gaussian components and based on the identified model a Bayesian inference strategy is developed to detect the faults which influence the product quality. Finally, the usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated on a laboratory continuous stirred tank heater (CSTH) setup.