Source identification of plant-wide faults based on k nearest neighbor time delay estimation

The identification of plant-wide faults is a very important topic as it enables plant operators to decrease rejections or to increase the product quality. This paper shows a fault propagation approach for this field of interest based on time delay estimation. Due to the fact that the estimation of time delays in multiple-input single-output systems or nonlinear systems is either impossible or very difficult with known methods, a new method based on k nearest neighbor imputation was developed and is validated in this paper theoretically. The effectiveness of the identification algorithm is demonstrated on several simulations and on an industrial hydrocracker plant.