Fault detection and diagnosis for process plants has been an active area of research for many years. This review presents a concise overview on supervised and unsupervised data‐driven approaches for fault detection and diagnosis in chemical processes. Methods based on supervised and unsupervised data‐driven techniques are reviewed, and the challenges in the field of fault detection and diagnosis have also been highlighted. It is observed that most of the data‐driven approaches are application specific, in that no single method can be used to obtain a generalized solution for nearly all purposes. The methods reviewed differ significantly from one to the other, and hence it is difficult to generalize any key similarity. The majority of the works proposed in the literature focused mainly on single fault detection, and do not cover the root‐cause diagnosis of the detected faults. In cases where both detection and diagnosis are performed, the focus is mainly for a single fault. In addition, majority of the articles do not extend to the diagnosis of the root cause for multiple and simultaneous faults.

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A debutanizer column located at a refinery in Malaysia produces LPG as its top product and light naphtha as its bottom product. Control of the product compositions of the column is very important to maintain the desired purities. The current control design of the debutanizer column is based on the classical proportional integral derivative approach, which has been found to be less effective in controlling the variations in the column as the process is characterized by strong nonlinear and uncertain dynamics. Here, intelligent control based on an adaptive neurofuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is investigated and compared against an artificial neural network, for the special case of limited training data of the industrial debutanizer column. The ANFIS-based controller outperforms the other control configurations for both set point tracking and disturbance rejection cases and has better generalization performance even when trained with limited data samples.

Efficient monitoring of highly complex process industries is essential for better management, safer operations and high-quality production. Timely detection of various faults helps to improve the performance of the complex industries, prevent various unfavorable consequences and reduce the maintenance cost. Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) for process monitoring and control has been an active field of research for the past two decades. Distillation columns are inherently nonlinear, and thus to have an accurate and robust performance, the fault detection methods should be based on nonlinear dynamic methods. The paper presents a robust data-driven fault detection approach for realistic tray upsets in the distillation column. The detection of tray faults in the distillation column is conducted by Nonlinear AutoRegressive with eXogenous Input (NARX) network with Tapped Delay Lines (TDL). Aspen Plus® Dynamic simulation has been used to generate normal and faulty datasets. The study shows that the proposed method can be used for the detection of tray faults in distillation column for dynamic process monitoring. The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated by the Missed Detection Rate (MDR) and the Detection Delay (DD).