A one-class support vector machine for detecting valve stiction

Abstract

In industrial processes, control valve stiction is known to be one of the primary causes for poor control loop performance. Stiction introduces oscillatory behaviour in the process, leading to increased energy consumption, variations in product quality, shortened equipment lifespan and a reduction in overall plant profitability. Several detection algorithms using routine operating data have been developed over the last few decades. However, with the exception of a handful of recent publications, few attempts to apply classical supervised learning techniques have been published thus far. In this work, principal component analysis, linear discriminant analysis and a one-class support vector machine are trained to detect stiction using time series features as input. These features are extracted from the data using the tsfresh package for Python. The training data consists of simulated stiction examples generated using the XCH stiction model as well as other sources of oscillation. The classifier is subsequently benchmarked against closed-loop stiction data collected in an industrial setting, with performance exceeding that of existing methods.