Enhancing fault detection in multivariate industrial processes: Kolmogorov–Smirnov non-parametric statistical approach

The accurate detection of abnormal events in modern process plants is extremely important. The detection of faults of small magnitude and in a noisy process environment is still a challenge that many industries face. In this paper, a Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) based non-parametric statistical fault indicator is proposed to identify a variety of sensor faults in process plants. The data collected from most modern process plants are randomly varying and non-Gaussian, due to which the multivariate scheme based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is considered. The KS-based indicator is amalgamated with the ICA multivariate model, which yields a novel ICA-KS-based fault detection (FD) scheme. The KS statistical indicator compares any two distributions and checks if they are similar or dissimilar. The potential of the KS indicator is extended in the FD domain, where the residuals of training and testing data are compared in a sliding window. The ability of the proposed ICA-KS-based FD strategy is validated on a simulated Distillation column (DC) process and the benchmark Tennessee Eastman (TE) process to identify a variety of sensor faults. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the detection performance of the ICA-KS scheme, which outperforms conventional FD-based methods with a high detection rate. • ICA is combined with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for fault detection is developed. • The threshold for fault detection is evaluated through Kernel density estimation. • The efficacy of the ICA-KS approach tested on two real-world industrial processes. • The results show the effectiveness of developed ICA-KS fault detection method.