Process fault diagnostics using the integrated graph model

On-line fault detection and diagnosis has an increasing interest in a chemical process industry, especially for a process control and automation. The chemical process needs an intelligent operation-aided workstation which can do such tasks as process monitoring, fault detection, fault diagnosis and action guidance in semiautomatic mode. These tasks can increase the performance of a process operation and give merits in economics, safety and reliability. Aiming these tasks, series of researches have been done in our lab. Main results from these researches are building appropriate knowledge representation models and a diagnosis mechanism for fault detection and diagnosis in a chemical process. The knowledge representation schemes developed in our previous research, the symptom tree model and the fault-consequence digraph, showed the effectiveness and the usefulness in a real-time application, of the process diagnosis, especially in large and complex plants. However in our previous approach, the diagnosis speed is its demerit in spite of its merits of high resolution, mainly due to using two knowledge models complementarily. In our current study, new knowledge representation scheme is developed which integrates the previous two knowledge models, the symptom tree and the fault-consequence digraph, into one. This new model is constructed using a material balance, energy balance, momentum balance and equipment constraints. Controller related constraints are included in this new model, which possesses merits of the two previous models. This new integrated model will be tested and verified by the real-time application in a BTX process or a crude unit process. The reliability and flexibility will be greatly enhanced compared to the previous model in spite of the low diagnosis speed. Nexpert Object for the expert system shell and SUN4 workstation for the hardware platform are used. TCP/IP for a communication protocol and interfacing to a dynamic simulator, SPEEDUP, for a dynamic data generation are being studied.