Fault Detection and Isolation of Non-Gaussian and Nonlinear Processes Based on Statistics Pattern Analysis and the k-Nearest Neighbor Method

Only low-order information of process data (i.e., mean, variance, and covariance) was considered in the principal component analysis (PCA)-based process monitoring method. Consequently, it cannot deal with continuous processes with strong dynamics, nonlinearity, and non-Gaussianity. To this aim, the statistics pattern analysis (SPA)-based process monitoring method achieves better monitoring results by extracting higher-order statistics (HOS) of the process variables. However, the extracted statistics do not strictly follow a Gaussian distribution, making the estimated control limits in Hotelling-T2 and squared prediction error (SPE) charts inaccurate, resulting in unsatisfactory monitoring performance. In order to solve this problem, this paper presents a novel process monitoring method using SPA and the k-nearest neighbor algorithm. In the proposed method, first, the statistics of process variables are calculated through SPA. Then, the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) method is used to monitor the extracted statistics. The kNN method only uses the paired distance of samples to perform fault detection. It has no strict requirements for data distribution. Hence, the proposed method can overcome the problems caused by the non-Gaussianity and nonlinearity of statistics. In addition, the potential of the proposed method in early fault detection or safety alarm and fault isolation is explored. The proposed method can isolate which variable or its statistic is faulty. Finally, the numerical examples and Tennessee Eastman benchmark process illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.