An Application of Support Vector Machines for Fault Diagnosis

Fault diagnosis is one of the most studied problems in process engineering. Recently, great research interest has been devoted to approaches that use classification methods to detect faults. This paper presents an application of a newly developed classification method - support vector machines - for fault diagnosis in an industrial case. A real set of operation data of a motor pump was used to train and test the support vector machines. The experiment results show that the support vector machines give higher correct detection rate of faults in comparison to rule-based diagnostics. In addition, the studied method can work with fewer training instances, what is important for online diagnostics.