Improved Convolutional Neural Network Based on Multi-head Attention Mechanism for Industrial Process Fault Classification

Deep learning theory demonstrates its great power in the complicated data processing field. As a prevalent deep learning technology, convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved some successful applications in the field of fault detection and classification in the complicated industrial systems because of its strong nonlinear feature extraction capability. However, the basic CNN views all the features equally and can not highlight these features which play a more important role in the fault classification procedure. To deal with this problem, this paper proposes an improved CNN model, called multi-head attention CNN (MACNN), to distinguish the importance of different features for better fault classification performance. In the MACNN framework, the raw training data are firstly analyzed by the multiple convolutional layers for feature extraction. Then, the features obtained by the convolution layers are used as the input of the multi-head attention (MA) layers. The introduction of the MA mechanism can help exploit more meaningful information by emphasizing the important features. Lastly, the softmax classifier is utilized to classify the fault patterns. To test the method performance, one case study on the benchmark Tennessee Eastman industrial system is performed and the results show that MACNN gives the better fault classification results than the traditional feedforward neural network (FNN) and CNN models.