Evaluation of model-based fault diagnosis combining physical insights and neural networks applied to an exhaust gas treatment system case study

Fault diagnosis can be used to early detect faults in a technical system, which means that workshop service can be planned before a component is fully degraded. Fault diagnosis helps with avoiding downtime, accidents and can be used to reduce emissions for certain applications. Traditionally, however, diagnosis systems have been designed using ad hoc methods and a lot of system knowledge. Model-based diagnosis is a systematic way of designing diagnosis systems that is modular and offers high performance. A model-based diagnosis system can be designed by making use of mathematical models that are otherwise used for simulation and control applications. A downside of model-based diagnosis is the modeling effort needed when no accurate models are available, which can take a large amount of time. This has motivated the use of data-driven diagnosis. Data-driven methods do not require as much system knowledge and modeling effort though they require large amounts of data and data from faults that can be hard to gather. Hybrid fault diagnosis methods combining models and training data can take advantage of both approaches decreasing the amount of time needed for modeling and does not require data from faults. In this thesis work a combined data-driven and model-based fault diagnosis system has been developed and evaluated for the exhaust treatment system in a heavy-duty diesel engine truck. The diagnosis system combines physical insights and neural networks to detect and isolate faults for the exhaust treatment system. This diagnosis system is compared with another system developed during this thesis using only model-based methods. Experiments have been done by using data from a heavy-duty truck from Scania. The results show the effectiveness of both methods in an industrial setting. It is shown how model-based approaches can be used to improve diagnostic performance. The hybrid method is showed to be an efficient way of developing a diagnosis system. Some downsides are highlighted such as the performance of the system developed using data-driven and model-based methods depending on the quality of the training data. Future work regarding the modularity and transferability of the hybrid method can be done for further evaluation