Fault detection of complicated processes based on an enhanced transformer network with graph attention mechanism

Abstract

Recently, deep learning becomes increasingly popular in the industrial data analysis field due to its distinguished feature representation capability. As an emerging deep learning technology, transformer network has attracted extensive attention, but its application in industrial fault detection is still not sufficiently exploited. Furthermore, the traditional transformer network mainly focuses on the time series information of the data, while ignoring the spatial characteristic of the data. For this problem, an improved transformer network model with graph attention mechanism (GA-Tran) is proposed and used for complicated process fault detection. Considering the strong coupling property of process variables, the presented method performs joint spatial-temporal learning by mining the data information in views of both time-dimension and variable-dimension. On the one hand, a transformer encoder module equipped with a self-attention mechanism is utilized to capture long-term temporal dependencies, while multi-scale convolution is integrated to abstract short-term time dependencies. On the other hand, a graph attention network is introduced into the transformer network to meticulously analyze the spatial relationships among variables. Considering the topology of the industrial process variables, we use spectral clustering to infer prior topology information, and remove intelligently irrelevant spatial information. Different from the existing transformer models with the anomaly scores as the monitoring indicator. Two monitoring statistics based on encoder features and reconstruction errors are constructed for process status monitoring. Studies on the Tennessee Eastman chemical process demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed GA-Tran method.