A new reconstruction-based auto-associative neural network for fault diagnosis in nonlinear systems

Auto-associative neural network (AANN) is a typical nonlinear principal component analysis method, which is widely used in industry for fault diagnosis purposes, especially in nonlinear systems. However, the basic AANN often suffers from “smearing effects” problems that may lead to misdiagnosis, particularly with regards to the complex faults involving multiple variables. In this work, a new reconstruction-based AANN (RBAANN) method is proposed to enhance the capacity of fault diagnosis. In RBAANN, a generic derivative equation is developed to investigate the effects of AANN model inputs on the prediction error between model inputs and outputs. Based on the derivative equation, the reconstruction-based index for single or multiple variables, which is defined as the minimum prediction error, is obtained by tuning the corresponding model inputs iteratively. However, without the prior knowledge of the real faulty variables, all the possible variable sets need to be evaluated by the reconstruction-based index, and this may result in an exhaustive search and cause a huge computational burden. Thus, a branch and bound algorithm is introduced into RBAANN to solve the variable selection problem. Finally, an efficient fault diagnosis strategy by integrating RBAANN and branch and bound algorithm (BAB-RBAANN) is implemented to further pinpoint the source of the detected faults. This BAB-RBAANN method can handle both single and multiple variable(s) faults for nonlinear systems without prior knowledge efficiently. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is evaluated on a validation example and an industrial example. Comparisons with other methods, including principal component analysis techniques, are also presented.