Generalized grouped contributions for hierarchical fault diagnosis with group Lasso

In process industries, it is necessary to conduct fault diagnosis after abnormality is found, with the aim to identify root cause variables and further provide instructive information for maintenance. Contribution plots along with multivariate statistical process monitoring are standard tools towards this goal, which, however, suffer from the smearing effect and high diagnostic complexity on large-scale processes. In fact, process variables tend to be naturally grouped, and in this work, a novel fault identification strategy based on group Lasso penalty along with a hierarchical fault diagnosis scheme is proposed by leveraging group information among variables. By introducing the group Lasso as a regularization approach, groups of irrelevant variables tend to yield exactly zero contributions collectively, which help find the exact root cause, alleviate the smearing effect, and furnish clear diagnostic information for process practitioners. For online computational convenience, an efficient numerical solution strategy is also presented. Besides, it turns out that the proposed approach also applies to dynamic monitoring models with lagged measurements augmented, thereby enjoying widespread generality. Its effectiveness is evaluated on both the Tennessee Eastman benchmark process and a pilot-scale experiment apparatus.