Plant-wide quantitative assessment of a process industry system’s operating state based on color-spectrum

•A general data-driven framework is proposed to evaluate the operating state of a process industry system.•For the first time, scientific data visualization and digital image process is combined to analyze multivariate time series.•The monitor data set is displayed based on scientific data visualization.•The plant-wide quantitative assessment of the operating state is realized using digital image process.

This paper presents a general theoretical framework to assess the operating state of a process industry system quantitatively based on meshing the theory of scientific data visualization and digital image processing. First, a series of color-spectrum, which represent the operating state of the system, is formed by mapping the monitor data set to a group of digital color images. Second, the common feature of color-spectrum, which is named benchmark-color-spectrum, is extracted as a standard of the normal state. Third, the abnormal degree can be quantified by calculating the difference of the benchmark-color-spectrum with observed color-spectrum. At last, a plant-wide operating state of the system in a period of time can be shown by plotting quantitative abnormal degree. Two case is included to illustrate the proposed method and its appropriateness. One is a general process industry system simulator named Tennessee Eastman Process. Another is an air compressor group which belongs to a real chemical plant.