An evolving approach to unsupervised and Real-Time fault detection in industrial processes

• A new approach to fault detection in industrial processes is presented.
• This approach uses TEDA algorithm and has autonomous learning.
• A practical application of TEDA algorithm to fault detection problems is presented.
• TEDA is applied to two different real world industrial fault detection problems.

Fault detection in industrial processes is a field of application that has gaining considerable attention in the past few years, resulting in a large variety of techniques and methodologies designed to solve that problem. However, many of the approaches presented in literature require relevant amounts of prior knowledge about the process, such as mathematical models, data distribution and pre-defined parameters. In this paper, we propose the application of TEDA – Typicality and Eccentricity Data Analytics – , a fully autonomous algorithm, to the problem of fault detection in industrial processes. In order to perform fault detection, TEDA analyzes the density of each read data sample, which is calculated based on the distance between that sample and all the others read so far. TEDA is an online algorithm that learns autonomously and does not require any previous knowledge about the process nor any user-defined parameters. Moreover, it requires minimum computational effort, enabling its use for real-time applications. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated with two different real world industrial plant data streams that provide “normal” and “faulty” data. The results shown in this paper are very encouraging when compared with traditional fault detection approaches.