Integration of fault diagnosis and control by finding a trade-off between the
detectability of stochastic fault and economics
Yuncheng Du, Hector Budman, Thomas Duever
Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1
(e-mail: hbudman@uwaterloo.ca, tom.duever@uwaterloo.ca)
Abstract: This paper presents a first principle model based methodology for simultaneous optimal tuning
of a fault detection algorithm and a feedback controller. The key idea is to calculate the effect of
stochastic input disturbances on the variability of the output variables by using a generalized polynomial
chaos (gPC) expansion and a mechanic model of the process. A two-level optimization is proposed for
simultaneously tuning the fault detection and controller algorithms. The goal of the outer level
optimization is to find a trade-off between the efficiency for detecting faults and the closed loop
performance, while the inner optimization is designed to optimally calibrate the fault detection algorithm.
The proposed method is illustrated for a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR). The results show that the
computational cost of the gPC-based method is significantly lower than a Monte Carlo (MC) simulation-
based approach, thus demonstrating the potential of the gPC method for dealing with large problems.
Keywords: Fault detection and control, polynomial chaos, economic impact
1. INTRODUCTION
Most fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) systems are
implemented at the supervisory level on top of the control
system. Thus, naturally fault detection approaches are based
on variables, which are also used for feedback control. While
there is a large body of literature on FDD (Zufiria, 2012,
Dong, et al., 2012), the issue of integration of control and
diagnostic algorithms has not been addressed as much. A key
challenge for integrating FDD and process control is that they
often have competing objectives. For instance, when process
control is very accurate, the corresponding controlled
variable deviates little from the setpoint while FDD requires
sufficiently large deviations for effective detection (Davoodi,
et al., 2013, Meng & Yang, 2012). Methods have been
proposed for optimal simultaneous tuning of FDD and
control based on robust norms (Jacobson & Nett, 1991, Scott,
et al., 2013), but these are often conservative since they are
based on worst-case scenarios or deterministic linear model.
To avoid linearization and reduce conservatism, standard
statistical monitoring charts have been used, but these studies
were limited to simple deterministic faults (Bin Shams, et al.,
2011). Compared with Monte Carlo (MC) simulations based
uncertainties analysis, a power series and polynomial chaos
expansions were used to propagate uncertainties onto states
and outputs, which in general saves computational time
(Nagy & Braatz, 2007).
The current work addresses the problem of optimal
simultaneous tuning of a FDD and controller in the presence
of stochastic disturbances by using gPC expansions of inputs
and outputs. A significant reduction in computational effort is
observed by using the gPC method as compared with MC
based-approach. The topics addressed in this work are as
follow:
(1) The tuning parameters of the closed loop controller and/or
control setpoint are optimized to achieve an optimal trade-off
between FDD efficacy and closed-loop performance.
(2) The generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) expansion and
Galerkin projections are used to quantify the variability in
controlled and manipulated variables resulting from
stochastic faults entering the system in the form of input
disturbances. A non-isothermal continuous stirred tank
reactor (CSTR) system is used as case study.
(3) Numerical tests are conducted to verify the ability of the
proposed method to design a fault detection/controller
combination that is both efficient for detecting faults and for
maintaining good closed loop performance.
This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, the
theoretical background on gPC is presented. The optimization
problems formulated for simultaneously tuning the fault
detection algorithm and the controller are given in section 3.
An endothermic continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) is
introduced as a case study in section 4. Analysis and
discussion of the results are presented in section 5 followed
by conclusions in section 6.
2. QUANTIFICATION OF VARIABILITY IN OUTPUTS
IN RESPONSE TO RANDOM INPUTS USING gPC
The objective is to quantify the effect of stochastic inputs on
different output variables (states), which are described by a
system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The
generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) method (Xiu, 2010) has
been proposed for approximating the states of a system with
random inputs by polynomial descriptions from the Wiener-
Askey family. A variable, x , is represented as a polynomial
chaos expansion:
Preprints of the 19th World Congress
The International Federation of Automatic Control
Cape Town, South Africa. August 24-29, 2014
Copyright © 2014 IFAC 7388