Cross-condition fault diagnosis of chillers based on an ensemble approach with adaptive weight allocation

The Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are complex and prone to failures during operation, often leading to significant energy waste. Timely and accurate Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) can enhance energy efficiency. The HVAC system operates under diverse conditions, data-driven models trained under existing conditions may experience performance degradation when faced with new conditions. Transfer learning offers an effective solution to this issue. This study proposes a novel transfer learning ensemble model based on adaptive weights, leveraging different transfer learning strategies to improve diagnosis performance under new conditions. Multiple cross-condition transfer learning tasks were implemented to test the proposed method, and its effectiveness was validated through multiple experiments to minimize the impact of randomness. Results showed that, compared to fine-tuning (FT), domain-adversarial neural network (DANN), and baseline models, the proposed method outperforms the other models. The average accuracy of multiple experiments improved by 0.21 % to 2.34 % compared to FT. Additionally, modifying DANN to utilize a small amount of labeled information from the target domain has led to greater overlap between the feature distributions of the source and target domains, resulting in improved performance that is close to that of FT. Finally, we analyzed the impact of target domain data volume on the performance of the four methods. The performance of the baseline model improved significantly with the increase in data volume, while the other models showed less improvement. Meanwhile, the diagnostic results of the baseline model were significantly influenced by experimental randomness when there is less training data, whereas the FT diagnostic results were relatively more stable.