Multi-agent Framework for Fault Detection & Diagnosis in Transient Operations

With the increasing emphasis on agile operations, the process industries have begun to focus on effectively managing transient operations such as transitions or batch/fed-batch processes. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent based decision fusion framework for monitoring and diagnosing faults during transitions. The proposed method integrates three fault diagnosis methodologies into a uniform and coordinated manner where collaboration among heterogeneous methods is enabled to achieve optimality in speed and accuracy of fault detection. We illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach through a pilot-scale distillation unit startup case study.