Alarm-Based Root Cause Analysis in Industrial Processes Using Deep Learning

Abstract: Alarm management systems have become indispensable in modern industry. Alarms inform the operator of abnormal situations, particularly in the case of equipment failures. Due to the interconnections between various parts of the system, each fault can affect other sections of the system operating normally. As a result, the fault propagates through faultless devices, increasing the number of alarms. Hence, the timely detection of the major fault that triggered the alarm by the operator can prevent the following consequences. However, due to the complexity of the system, it is often impossible to find precise relations between the underlying fault and the alarms. As a result, the operator needs support to make an appropriate decision immediately. Modeling alarms based on the historical alarm data can assist the operator in determining the root cause of the alarm. This research aims to model the relations between industrial alarms using historical alarm data in the database. Firstly, alarm data is collected, and alarm tags are sequenced. Then, these sequences are converted to numerical vectors using word embedding. Next, a self-attention-based BiLSTM-CNN classifier is used to learn the structure and relevance between historical alarm data. After training the model, this model is used for online fault detection. Finally, as a case study, the proposed model is implemented in the well-known Tennessee Eastman process, and the results are presented.