LSTMED: An uneven dynamic process monitoring method based on LSTM and Autoencoder neural network

Due to the complicated production mechanism in multivariate industrial processes, different dynamic features of variables raise challenges to traditional data-driven process monitoring methods which assume the process data is static or dynamically consistent. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a novel process monitoring method based on the long short-term memory (LSTM) and Autoencoder neural network (called LSTMED) for multivariate process monitoring with uneven dynamic features. First, the LSTM units are arranged in the encoder–decoder form to construct an end-to-end model. Then, the constructed model is trained in an unsupervised manner to capture long-term time dependency within variables and dominant representation of high dimensional process data. Afterward, the kernel density estimation (KDE) method is performed to determine the control limit only based on the reconstruction error from historical normal data. Finally, effective online monitoring for uneven dynamic process can be achieved. The performance and advantage of the process monitoring method proposed are explained through typical cases, including the numerical simulation and Tennessee Eastman (TE) benchmark process, and comparative experimental analysis with state-of-the-art methods.