Review and Perspectives of Data-Driven Distributed Monitoring for Industrial Plant-Wide Processes

Process monitoring is crucial for maintaining favorable operating conditions and has received considerable attention in previous decades. Currently, a plant-wide process generally consists of multiple operational units and a large number of measured variables. The correlation among the variables and units is complex and results in the imperative but challenging monitoring of such plant-wide processes. With the rapid advancement of industrial sensing techniques, process data with meaningful process information are collected. Data-driven multivariate statistical plant-wide process monitoring (DMSPPM) has become popular. The key idea of DMSPPM is first decomposing a plant-wide process into multiple subprocesses and then establishing a data-driven model for monitoring the process, in which process variable decomposition is important for guaranteeing the monitoring performance. In the current review, we first introduce the basics of multivariate statistical process monitoring and highlight the necessity of designing a distributed monitoring scheme. Then state-of-the-art DMSPPM methods are revisited. Finally, opportunities of and challenges to the DMSPPM methods are discussed.