New Fusion Architectures for Performance Enhancement of a PCA-Based Fault
Diagnosis and Isolation System
S. Pirooz Azad*, S. Bahrampour*, B. Moshiri*, K. Salahshoor**
* Control and Intelligence Processing Center of Excellence, School of ECE,
University of Tehran, Iran (e-mail: s.piroozazad@ece.ut.ac.ir,
s.bahrampour@ece.ut.ac.ir, moshiri@ut.ac.ir).
**Petroleum University of Technology, Tehran, Iran (e-mail:
salahshoor@put.ac.ir)
Abstract: This paper proposes some new fusion architectures to enhance the diagnostic operation of a
principal component analysis (PCA)-based fault diagnosis and isolation (FDI) system. The first approach
presents a serial classifier fusion methodology by incorporating a support vector machine (SVM) classifier
to diagnose PCA-based fault features. Then, parallel fusion architecture is proposed to fuse the fault
diagnostics due to the individual SVM, Bayes and K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) classifiers. The two series
and parallel fusion architectures are finally incorporated into a new combined framework to yield a more
efficient and powerful diagnostic capabilities. Extensive simulation test experiments are conducted to
demonstrate the comparative performances of the new proposed fusion-based FDI systems on the
Tennessee Eastman (TE) process plant as a large-scale benchmark problem.
1. INTRODUCTION
Large amounts of data are collected in many industrial
processes for monitoring and control purposes. The most
important parts of condition monitoring are fault detection
and isolation (FDI). Fault detection is used to determine
when abnormal process behaviour has occurred whereas in
fault isolation (FI), one distinguishes between faults.
Data driven methods have attracted much attentions in the
recent research works. These methods can be divided into
statistical or non-statistical ones. Principal component
analysis (PCA), fisher discriminate analysis (FDA), partial
least squares (PLS) and statistical pattern classifiers form
major classes of statistical feature extraction methods
(Chiang et al, 2000). Neural network and support vector
machines (SVM) (Widodo et al, 2007) are the most powerful
methods of non-statistical methods. Good generalization
ability is an important characteristic of SVMs. Furthermore,
it is very useful for solving problems with small sample set
and high dimension. Thus, it is a promising algorithm for
application to fault diagnosis. A multiclass SVM has been
recently proposed for FDI in (Hui et al, 2005).
Nowadays, data fusion problem is widely used in different
fields of study. Furthermore, its accomplishments still
continue due to the promotion in other majors. The
synergistic use of overlapping and complementary data
sources provides such a rich database which is not available
through individual sources. As a matter of fact, the overlaps
of the data sources bring about robustness which is not
necessarily attained through separate sources. Moreover, this
technique can yield higher accuracy compared to each single
sources. The application of information fusion method in
multi-classifier, namely multi-classifier fusion, can fuse the
output of corresponding well-behaved classifiers by proper
fusion methods and reduce the limitations of each single
classifier. Therefore, the fused classifier leads to more precise
results by using the complementarities among different
classifiers. (Ruta et al, 2000). There are generally two types
of classifier combination which are known as classifier
selection and classifier fusion (Woods et al, 1997). In
classifier selection, each classifier makes decisions based on
the information which exists in a subspace of the whole data
set and then the output of different classifiers are fused
together, leading to a final decision (Rastrigin et al, 1981).
On the other hand, in classifier fusion, each classifier is
trained over the whole feature space and the final decision is
derived through an aggregation process (Ng et al, 1992). In
this paper, classifier fusion, one of the appealing aspects of
data fusion, is mainly discussed. The other approach
considers another structure in which the output of one
classifier is the input of second classifier. This approach is
usually accomplished by pattern recognition algorithms
(Duda et al, 1973).
The major contribution of this paper is to propose some
fusion structures which can be used for FDI. The first
algorithm is called Serial Classifier Fusion which utilizes
support vector machine classifier and PCA to identify faults
in large scale processes. Parallel Classifier Fusion is the
second proposed strategy which fuses SVM, Bayes and K
Nearest Neighbour (KNN) classifiers. Bayes is a parametric
method of classification and KNN is a nonparametric one
which has been widely used for classification problems
(Duda et al, 2000). The correct classification rates of these
two fusion structures far overweigh separate classifiers i.e.
SVM, Bayes and KNN and yield into a more proper fault
diagnosis. Finally, a Parallel-Serial classifier fusion scheme is
proposed which is the combination of Serial and Parallel
Proceedings of the 7th IFAC Symposium on
Fault Detection, Supervision and Safety of Technical Processes
Barcelona, Spain, June 30 - July 3, 2009
978-3-902661-46-3/09/$20.00 © 2009 IFAC 852 10.3182/20090630-4-ES-2003.0306