A Novel Distributed Process Monitoring Framework of VAE-Enhanced with Deep Neural Network

Intelligent manufacturing process needs to adopt distributed monitoring scenario due to its massive, high-dimensional and complex data. Distributed process monitoring has been introduced into global monitoring and local monitoring to analyze the characteristic relationship between process data. However, the existing framework methods ignore or suppress the fault information and thus cannot effectively identify the local faults and the time sequence characteristics between units in the batch production system. This paper proposes a novel distributed process monitoring framework based on Girvan-Newman algorithm modular subunit partitioning and probabilistic learning model with deep neural networks. First, Girvan-Newman algorithm is used to divide the complex manufacturing system modularized to reduce the latitude of data processing. Second, variational autoencoder (VAE) is adopted to ensure the stability of local analysis, and long short-term memory is adopted to improve the VAE model to detect global multi-time scale anomalies. Finally, distributed process fault detection is carried out for each subunit in a separate and integrated manner, and the performance of the framework in distributed process monitoring is analyzed through two fault detection indicators T2 and SPE statistics. A case study of the Tennessee Eastman Process is used to demonstrate the performance and applicability of the proposed framework. Results show that the proposed VAE enhancement framework based on the DNN could accurately identify faults in distributed process monitoring and locate the specific sub-units where the fault occurs. Compared with VAE-DNN method and traditional process monitoring methods, the framework proposed in this paper has higher fault detection rate and lower false alarm rate, and the detection rate of some faults can reach 100%.