Committees of Learning Agents

We describe how machine learning and decision theory is combined in an application that supports control room operators of a combined heating and power plant to cope with the overwhelming complexity of situations when severe plant disturbancies occur. The application is designed as an assistant, rather than as an automatic system that intervenes directly in the operator/plant loop. The application is required to handle vague and numerically imprecise background information in the construction of classifier committees. A classifier committee (or ensemble) is a classifier created by combining the predictions of multiple sub-classifiers. The presented method combines classifiers into a committee by using computational methods for decision analysis that are designed to work when the information at hand is imprecise. The application evaluates and make priorities between classified alarms according to credibilities that depend on the current context. Machine learning techniques are used to construct classifiers that recognize various malfunctions in a process, determine whether a situation is normal or not, and make priorities among alarms.