Amalgamation of anomaly-detection indices for enhanced process monitoring

Accurate and effective anomaly detection and diagnosis of modern industrial systems are crucial for ensuring reliability and safety and for maintaining desired product quality. Anomaly detection based on principal component analysis (PCA) has been studied intensively and largely applied to multivariate processes with highly cross-correlated process variables; however conventional PCA-based methods often fail to detect small or moderate anomalies. In this paper, the proposed approach integrates two popular process-monitoring detection tools, the conventional PCA-based monitoring indices Hotelling's T2 and Q and the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA). We develop two EWMA tools based on the Q and T2 statistics, T2-EWMA and Q-EWMA, to detect anomalies in the process mean. The performances of the proposed methods were compared with that of conventional PCA-based anomaly-detection methods by applying each method to two examples: a synthetic data set and experimental data collected from a flow heating system. The results clearly show the benefits and effectiveness of the proposed methods over conventional PCA-based methods.