Continual Learning for Multimode Dynamic Process Monitoring With Applications to an Ultra–Supercritical Thermal Power Plant

This paper introduces a novel sparse dynamic inner principal component analysis (SDiPCA) based monitoring for multimode dynamic processes. Different from traditional multimode monitoring algorithms, a model is updated for sequential modes by memorizing the significant features of existing modes. By adopting the concept of intelligent synapses in continual learning, a loss of quadratic term is introduced to penalize the changes of mode–relevant parameters, where modified synaptic intelligence (MSI) is proposed to estimate the parameter importance. Thus, the proposed algorithm is referred to as SDiPCA–MSI. When a new mode arrives, a set of normal samples should be collected. The previous significant features are consolidated without explicitly storing training samples, while extracting new information from the current mode. Consequently, SDiPCA–MSI can provide outstanding performance for successive modes. Characteristics of the proposed approach are discussed, including the computational complexity, advantages and potential limitations. Compared with several state-of-the-art monitoring methods, the effectiveness and superiorities of the proposed method are demonstrated by a continuous stirred tank heater case and a practical industrial system. Note to Practitioners—Multimode process monitoring is increasingly significant as industrial systems generally operate in varying operating conditions. However, most researches focus on multiple local monitoring models for complex multimode processes and assume that data of all possible modes are available and stored before learning. When similar or new modes arrive, local models are rebuilt corresponding to each mode and the model’s capacity would increase with the continuous emergence of modes. Adaptive methods are a branch of multimode monitoring algorithms, but they strive to extract information of the current mode to ensure the monitoring performance while forgetting the previously learned knowledge gradually. This paper proposes a novel sparse dynamic inner principal component analysis with continual learning ability for multimode dynamic process monitoring, where modified synaptic intelligence is developed to measure the parameter importance accurately. It requires limited computation and storage resources for successive modes, which is convenient for practical applications. Similar to current multimode process monitoring algorithms, a set of data should be collected before learning a new mode, which may bring difficulties to real–time monitoring. For industrial systems, such as large–scale power plants and chemical systems, the proposed method has outstanding ability to monitor successive dynamic modes.