A neural network methodology for process fault diagnosis

Abstract The ability of knowledge‐based expert systems to facilitate the automation of difficult problems in process engineering that require symbolic reasoning and an efficient manipulation of diverse knowledge has generated considerable interest recently. Rapid deployment of these systems, however, has been difficult because of the tedious nature of knowledge acquisition, the inability of the system to learn or dynamically improve its performance, and the unpredictability of the system outside its domain of expertise. This paper proposes a neural‐network‐based methodology for providing a potential solution to the preceding problems in the area of process fault diagnosis. The potential of this approach is demonstrated with the aid of an oil refinery case study of the fluidized catalytic cracking process. The neural‐network‐based system successfully diagnoses the faults it is trained upon. It is able to generalize its knowledge to successfully diagnose novel fault combinations it is not explicitly trained upon. Furthermore, the network can also handle incomplete and uncertain data. In addition, this approach is compared with the knowledge‐based approach.