Industrial process fault diagnosis based on feature enhanced meta-learning toward domain generalization scenarios

With the rise of the Internet of Things, computing science, and artificial intelligence, data-driven fault diagnosis methods for industrial processes have attracted considerable attention. However, these methods typically assume that the distribution of the test data (target domains) is similar to that of the training data (source domains), making it difficult to deploy them in actual scenarios because the distribution of the collected data varies with operating conditions. Faced with this challenge, a novel fault diagnosis method based on feature enhanced meta-learning (FEML) is proposed to learn domain generalization knowledge effectively. It aims to jointly extract domain-invariant information that can be transferred across domains, and domain-specific information related to classification labels. First, feature extractors based on gated recurrent units (GRUs) are designed to capture domain-invariant and domain-specific representations with time-sequence characteristics from industrial process data. Second, a meta-learning strategy is introduced to enhance the domain-specific representation, thus improving the generalization ability of the model without accessing the target domains. Finally, the Tennessee Eastman process (TEP), Fed-Batch Fermentation Penicillin process (FBFP), and Three-Phase Flow process (TPFP) are used to verify the effectiveness of FEML. The results illustrate that the FEML is robust and outperforms other related methods. The diagnostic accuracies for TEP, FBFP, and TPFP are 87.11%, 95.94%, and 83.07%, respectively.