Broad Convolutional Neural Network Based Industrial Process Fault Diagnosis With Incremental Learning Capability

Fault diagnosis, which identifies the root cause of the observed out-of-control status, is essential to counteracting or eliminating faults in industrial processes. Many conventional data-driven fault diagnosis methods ignore the fault tendency of abnormal samples, and they need a complete retraining process to include the newly collected abnormal samples or fault classes. In this article, a broad convolutional neural network (BCNN) is designed with incremental learning capability for solving the aforementioned issues. The proposed method combines several consecutive samples as a data matrix, and it then extracts both fault tendency and nonlinear structure from the obtained data matrix by using convolutional operation. After that, the weights in fully connected layers can be trained based on the obtained features and their corresponding fault labels. Because of the architecture of this network, the diagnosis performance of the BCNN model can be improved by adding newly generated additional features. Finally, the incremental learning capability of the proposed method is also designed, so that the BCNN model can update itself to include new coming abnormal samples and fault classes. The proposed method is applied both to a simulated process and a real industrial process. Experimental results illustrate that it can better capture the characteristics of the fault process, and effectively update diagnosis model to include new coming abnormal samples, and fault classes.