A probabilistic self-validating soft-sensor with application to wastewater treatment

In the wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), soft sensors are viewed as a simple signal estimator for hard-to-measure quantities. However, the presence of unreliable data, coupled with increasing demands for measurement quality assurance, has rendered inadequate such a simplistic view. In this paper, a probabilistic self-validating soft-sensor is proposed with the capability of performing self-diagnostics, self-reconstruction and online uncertainty measurement. In this framework, data collecting for soft-sensor modeling (easy-to-measure data) is validated by a Variational Bayesian Principal Component Analysis (VBPCA) model before performing a soft-sensor model construction. By integrating Relevant Vector Machine (RVM) as a predictive model, not only prediction values are obtained, but also the credibility of information for easy-to-measure and hard-to-measure quantities can be generated. The performance of the proposed soft-sensor is validated through two simulation studies of WWTPs with different process characteristics. The results suggest that the proposed strategy significantly improves the prediction performance.