Supervised and semi-supervised probabilistic learning with deep neural networks for concurrent process-quality monitoring.

Concurrent process-quality monitoring helps discover quality-relevant process anomalies and quality-irrelevant process anomalies. It especially works well in chemical plants with faults that cause quality problems. Traditional monitoring strategies are limitedly applied in chemical plants because quality targets in training data are insufficient. It is hard for inflexible models to fully capture the strongly nonlinear process-quality correlations. Also, deterministic models are mapped from process variables to qualities without any consideration of uncertainties. Simultaneously, a slow sampling rate for quality variables is ubiquitous in chemical plants since a product quality test is often time-consuming and expensive. Motivated by these limitations, this paper proposes a new concurrent process-quality monitoring scheme based on a probabilistic generative deep learning model developed from variational autoencoder. The supervised model is firstly developed and then the semi-supervised version is extended to solve the issue of missing targets. Especially, the semi-supervised learning algorithm is accomplished with an optimal parameter estimation in the light of maximum likelihood principle and no any hyperparameters are introduced. Two case studies validate that the proposed method effectively outperforms the other comparative methods in concurrent process-quality monitoring.