On Residual-based Diagnosis of Physical Systems

In this article we describe a novel diagnosis methodology for physical systems such as industrial production systems. The article consists of two parts: Part one analyzes the differences between using sensor values and using residual values for fault diagnosis. Residual values denote the health of a component by comparing sensor values to a predefined model of normal behaviour. We further analyse how faults propagate through components of a physical system and argue for the use of residual values for diagnosing physical systems. In part two we extend the theory of established consistency-based diagnosis algorithms to use residual values. We also illustrate how users of the presented diagnosis methodology are free to substitute the residual generating equations and the diagnosis algorithm to suit their specific needs.For diagnosis, we present the algorithm HySD, based on Satisfiability Modulo Linear Arithmetic. We present an implementation of HySD using threshold values and a symbolic diagnosis approach. However, the approach is also suitable to integrate modern machine learning methods for anomaly detection and combine them with a multitude of diagnosis approaches.Through experiments on the process-industry benchmark Tennessee Eastman Process and another benchmark consisting of multiple tank systems we show the feasibility of our approach. Overall we show how our novel diagnosis approach offers a practical methodology that allows industry to advance from current state of the art anomaly detection to automated fault diagnosis.