With the Industry 4.0 era coming, modern chemical plants will be gradually transformed into smart factories, which sets higher requirements for fault detection and diagnosis(FDD) to enhance operation safety intelligence. In a typical chemical process, there are hundreds of process variables. Feature selection is a key to the efficiency and effectiveness of FDD. Even though artificial immune system has advantages in adaptation and independency on a large number of fault samples, antibody library construction used to be based on experience. It is not only time consuming, but also lack of scientific foundation in fault feature selection, which may deteriorate the FDD performance of the AIS. In this paper, a fault antibody feature selection optimization(FAFSO) algorithm is proposed based on genetic algorithm to optimize the fault antibody features and the antibody libraries’ thresholds simultaneously. The performance of the proposed FAFSO algorithms is illustrated through the Tennessee Eastman benchmark problem.

According to industry 4.0, modern factories are transforming into smart factories, which set higher requirements for fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) to enhance operating safety and manufacturing sustainability. This paper gives a brief review on the state-of-the-art and challenges of chemical process FDD. Since the applications of FDD to real chemical processes are few, recent researches mainly focus on solving practical problems. Furthermore, with the big data era coming, the automation of FDD in chemical processes would be realized.

Although modern chemical processes are highly automatic, abnormal situation management (ASM) still heavily relies on human operators. Process fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) are one of the most important issues of ASM but few FDD systems have been satisfactorily applied in real chemical processes since the concept of FDD was proposed about 40 years ago. In this paper, developments of chemical process FDD are briefly reviewed. The reason why FDD has not been widely implemented in the chemical process industry is discussed. One of the insights gained is that some basic problems in FDD such as how to define faults and how many faults to diagnose have not even been addressed well while researchers tirelessly try to invent new methods to diagnose fault. A new framework is proposed based on the big data in a cloud computing environment of a big chemical corporation for addressing the challenging issues in ASM. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.