A Bayesian Approach to Control Loop Performance Diagnosis Incorporating Background Knowledge of Response Information

Abstract

To isolate the problem source degrading the control loop performance, this work focuses on how to incorporate background knowledge into Bayesian inference. In an effort to reduce dependence on the amount of historical data available, we consider a general kind of background knowledge which appears in many applications. The knowledge, known as response information, is about what faults can possibly affect each of the monitors. We show how this knowledge can be translated to constraints on the underlying probability distributions and introduced in the Bayesian diagnosis. In this way, the dimensionality of the observation space is reduced and thus the diagnosis can be more reliable. Furthermore, for the judgments to be consistent, the set of posterior probabilities of each possible abnormality that are computed from different observation subspaces is synthesized to obtain the partially ordered posteriors. The eigenvalue formulation is used on the pairwise comparison matrix. The proposed approach is applied to a diagnosis problem on an oil sand solids handling system, where it is shown how the combination of background knowledge and data enhances the control performance diagnosis even when the abnormality data are sparse in the historical database.