Automatic design of detection tests in complex dynamic systems

In complex industrial plants, there are usually lots of sensors and the modelling of the plant leads to lots of mathematical relations. Before using classical tools for fault detection, the first problem to solve is: what sensors and mathematical relations have to be selected for the design of a detection test such as a state observer or a parity space based detection algorithms. This paper presents a general method for automatically selecting relevant sensors and relations that may be used for the design of the different detection tests. This method, which is based on a structural analysis of the process, provides all the testable subsystems and permits the selection of the most interesting detection tests regarding detectability and diagnosticabillity criteria.