Fault detection of industrial processes using attention-based gated recurrent unit autoencoder with skip connection

Abstract With the continuous evolution of modern industrial technology, industrial production has grown progressively complex, necessitating the use of various sensors to measure multiple process variables. However, intricate temporal dependencies and nonlinear relationships between data presented by multivariate sequences pose significant challenges to process fault detection. In response to these challenges, this paper proposes an attention-based gated recurrent unit autoencoder with skip connection (SAGRU-AE) model for monitoring large-scale, nonlinear, and multivariate industrial process faults. SAGRU-AE combines gated recurrent units, multi-head self-attention, and autoencoder to extract features from multivariable time series data efficiently. Concurrently, feature reuse is achieved through the skip connection structure, which improves the accuracy of data reconstruction. Based on the implementation of process data feature extraction and input reconstruction in SAGRU-AE, two statistics have been developed, namely the H 2 statistic and square prediction error ( SPE ) statistic, for fault detection tasks. Ultimately, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms are validated through experimentation on the TE process.