Distributed chaotic bat algorithm for sensor fault diagnosis in AHUs based on a decentralized structure

Abstract

The effective operation of sensors in heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to promote high-efficiency, energy-saving and low-risk intelligent buildings. However, most existing methods are either based on a centralized architecture or employ only pure digital simulation platforms for HVAC sensor fault diagnosis and verification, which are difficult to meet the complex and dynamic needs of HVCA systems. To overcome the difficulty in employment of centralized architecture involved multi sensor fault diagnosis and fault diagnosis methods limited by pure digital simulation platform, a fully distributed chaotic bat algorithm is proposed to diagnosis multiple-sensor faults and is verified by the hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform in HVAC systems. First, inspired by the bat swarm intelligence and multiple agents, we characterize the sensor fault diagnosis problem as an optimization problem of the bat predation behavior. Specifically, each sensor node is abstracted as a bat colony, and each bat colony communicates with directly connected neighboring bat colony in physical space. Second, to avoid the tendency of bat algorithm to fall into locally optimal solutions, the tent chaotic map is employed to enhance the bat colony search ability for improving the randomness of bat algorithm, involves escaping from local extreme points and increasing the diversity of the bat colony. Finally, we embed the temperature and humidity sensors into the hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform to construct the near-actual physical environment. The performance and convergence of the proposed method are verified using both a pure digital simulation platform and a built-in hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform. Compared with basic bat algorithm (BA), particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) and chaotic bat algorithm (CBA), the proposed fully distributed chaotic bat algorithm (DCBA) have higher accuracy and can achieve the 98.41 % accuracy in fixed bias (FB) sensor faults, 96.96 % accuracy in complete failure (CF), 95.84 % in drift bias (DB) and 96.08 % accuracy in accuracy drops (AD).