DSTN: Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Network for Early Fault Warning in Chemical Processes

Abstract

Multivariate time series prediction, especially in early fault warning for chemical processes, poses significant challenges. The advent of graph neural network (GNN) method has made breakthroughs in this domain by enabling the processing of topological data. However, the traditional methods suffer from the issue of over-smoothing and inability to capture intricate multi-scale spatio-temporal dependencies. Additionally, the existing graph structures fall short in describing the complex spatial relationships among multi-stage sensors, impeding their adaptability to dynamically evolving chain reaction scenarios. To alleviate these limitations, a novel Dynamic spatio-Temporal Network for early fault warning in chemical processes, named DSTN for short, is proposed in this paper. We extract the spatial and temporal features of the time series by the designed dynamic GNN and the improved Transformer network. Then, we integrate the spatio-temporal features through the residual network. DSTN has the following advantages: (1) A one-dimensional convolutional neural network is seamlessly incorporated into the Transformer architecture for bolstering its capacity to discern both global and local features within time series. (2) The continuous sliding window and mutual information methods are employed to construct a dynamic topology graph, and a K-order adjacency matrix is designed to rectify the inefficiencies in learning weights associated with convolution kernel parameters. (3) Multiple spatio-temporal modules interconnected via residual connection to adaptively fuse multi-scale features. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed DSTN method outperforms existing methods in terms of both performance and interpretability in early fault warning of chemical processes.