Correlation-Aided Neural Network for Distributed Process Monitoring of Large-Scale Industrial Automation Systems

In this article, a correlation-aided neural network (CANN) framework is proposed for distributed process monitoring of large-scale industrial automation systems. First, to model the nonlinear data relationship of multiple subsystems, a feature space is learned for each subsystem by means of neural network-based nonlinear projection. Second, different from conventional distributed monitoring methods, a distributed learning method and a novel objective function are proposed, where the influence of uncertainties is decreased by considering the correlation of variables among multiple subsystems. Third, a process monitoring method is proposed based on the CANN framework. The impact of the fault is analyzed, and the optimal monitoring performance is achieved by considering the correlation of all subsystems. To further reduce communication overhead among multiple subsystems, a tradeoff between monitoring performance and communication overhead is made based on gradients of the CANN model. Theoretical analysis demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method. The case studies on a multizone heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system and the Tennessee Eastman benchmark process are given to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of the proposed method.