Risk-based fault detection using Self-Organizing Map

• A new approach based on Self-Organizing Map is proposed to detect faults.
• Integration of fault detection with risk assessment methodology.
• Fault risk characterization into different levels to enable focused system monitoring.

The complexity of modern systems is increasing rapidly and the dominating relationships among system variables have become highly non-linear. This results in difficulty in the identification of a system׳s operating states. In turn, this difficulty affects the sensitivity of fault detection and imposes a challenge on ensuring the safety of operation. In recent years, Self-Organizing Maps has gained popularity in system monitoring as a robust non-linear dimensionality reduction tool. Self-Organizing Map is able to capture non-linear variations of the system. Therefore, it is sensitive to the change of a system׳s states leading to early detection of fault. In this paper, a new approach based on Self-Organizing Map is proposed to detect and assess the risk of fault. In addition, probabilistic analysis is applied to characterize the risk of fault into different levels according to the hazard potential to enable a refined monitoring of the system. The proposed approach is applied on two experimental systems. The results from both systems have shown high sensitivity of the proposed approach in detecting and identifying the root cause of faults. The refined monitoring facilitates the determination of the risk of fault and early deployment of remedial actions and safety measures to minimize the potential impact of fault.