Bayesian network-based root cause analysis and fault pathway identification in complex industrial processes

Abstract

Real-time root cause identification (RCI) of faults or abnormal events in industries gives plant personnel the opportunity to address the faults before they progress and lead to failure. RCI in industrial systems must deal with their complex behavior, variable interactions, corrective actions of control systems and variability in faulty behavior. Bayesian networks (BNs) is a data-driven graph-based method that utilizes multivariate sensor data generated during industrial operations for RCI. Bayesian networks, however, require data discretization if data contains both discrete and continuous variables. Traditional discretization techniques such as equal width (EW) or equal frequency (EF) discretization result in loss of dynamic information and often lead to erroneous RCI. To deal with this limitation, we propose the use of a dynamic discretization technique called Bayesian Blocks (BB) which adapts the bin sizes based on the properties of data itself. In this work, we compare the effectiveness of three discretization techniques, namely EW, EF and BB coupled with Bayesian Networks on generation of fault propagation (causal) maps and root cause identification in complex industrial systems. We demonstrate the performance of the three methods on the industrial benchmark Tennessee-Eastman (TE) process. For two complex faults in the TE process, the BB with BN method successfully diagnosed correct root causes of the faults, and reduced redundancy (up to 50%) and improved the propagation paths in causal maps compared to other two techniques.