Domain Adversarial Neural Network Regression to design transferable soft sensor in a power plant

Abstract

In this paper, a new approach is proposed for designing transferable soft sensors. Soft sensing is one of the significant applications of data-driven methods in the condition monitoring of plants. While hard sensors can be easily used in various plants, soft sensors are confined to the specific plant they are designed for and cannot be used in a new plant or even used in some new working conditions in the same plant. In this paper, a solution is proposed for this underlying obstacle in data-driven condition monitoring systems. Data-driven methods suffer from the fact that the distribution of the data by which the models are constructed may not be the same as the distribution of the data to which the model will be applied. This issue ultimately leads to the decline of models’ accuracy. We proposed a new transfer learning (TL) based regression method, called Domain Adversarial Neural Network Regression (DANN-R), and employed it for designing transferable soft sensors. We used data collected from the SCADA system of an industrial power plant to comprehensively investigate the functionality of the proposed method. The result reveals that the proposed transferable soft sensor can successfully adapt to new plants and new working conditions.