A process monitoring system based on the Kohonen self-organizing maps

Process monitoring and fault diagnosis have been studied widely in recent years, and the number of industrial applications with encouraging results has grown rapidly. In the case of complex processes a computer-aided monitoring enhances operators possibilities to run the process economically. In this paper, a fault diagnosis system will be described and some application results from the Outokumpu Harjavalta smelter will be discussed. The system monitors process states using neural networks (Kohonen self-organizing maps, SOMs) in conjunction with heuristic rules, which are also used to detect equipment malfunctions. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.