Graph Complexity Reduction of Exergy-Based FDI—A Tennessee Eastman Process Case Study

When applying graph-based fault detection and isolation (FDI) methods to the attributed graph data of large and complex industrial processes, the computational abilities and speed of these methods are adversely affected by the increased complexity. This paper proposes and evaluates five reduction techniques for the exergy-graph-based FDI method. Unlike the graph reduction techniques available in literature, the reduction techniques proposed in this paper can easily be applied to the type of attributed graph used by graph-based FDI methods. The attributed graph data of the Tennessee Eastman process are used in this paper since it is a popular process to use for the evaluation of fault diagnostic methods and is both large and complex. To evaluate the proposed reduction techniques, three FDI methods are applied to the original attributed graph data of the process and the performance of these FDI methods used as control data. Each proposed reduction technique is applied to the attributed graph data of the process, after which all three FDI methods are applied to the reduced graph data to evaluate their performance. The FDI performance obtained with reduced graph data is compared to the FDI performance using the control data. This paper shows that, using the proposed graph reduction techniques, it is possible to significantly reduce the size and complexity of the attributed graph of a system while maintaining a level of FDI performance similar to that achieved prior to any graph reduction.