Physics-guided graph learning soft sensor for chemical processes

Abstract

The surge in data-driven soft sensors for industrial processes is evident. However, most of them suffer from the limitation of being black-box models and this will hamper their widespread use. In response to this challenge, this study proposes a physics-guided graph-learning soft sensor that integrates a physical understanding of industrial processes by incorporating graph-based concepts with process physics. The soft sensor first constructs physical information based on causal relationships between variables using the conditional Granger causality test. Subsequently, it autonomously learns the unique sample information of each observation while employing a regularization loss to ensure the sparsity of the learned information. The model employs a two-stream structure for spatiotemporal encoding of both the physical and sample information. The modeling and prediction results on a penicillin fermentation process indicate that, using the proposed method, the knowledge gained from the data aligns with existing prior knowledge. This approach shows promise in filling the gap between data-driven and physics-based modeling in chemical processes.