Interaction-Aware Graph Neural Networks for Fault Diagnosis of Complex Industrial Processes

Fault diagnosis of complex industrial processes becomes a challenging task due to various fault patterns in sensor signals and complex interactions between different units. However, how to explore the interactions and integrate with sensor signals remains an open question. Considering that the sensor signals and their interactions in an industrial process with the form of nodes and edges can be represented as a graph, this article proposes a novel interaction-aware and data fusion method for fault diagnosis of complex industrial processes, named interaction-aware graph neural networks (IAGNNs). First, to describe the complex interactions in an industrial process, the sensor signals are transformed into a heterogeneous graph with multiple edge types, and the edge weights are learned by the attention mechanism, adaptively. Then, multiple independent graph neural network (GNN) blocks are employed to extract the fault feature for each subgraph with one edge type. Finally, each subgraph feature is concatenated or fused by a weighted summation function to generate the final graph embedding. Therefore, the proposed method can learn multiple interactions between sensor signals and extract the fault feature from each subgraph by message passing operation of GNNs. The final fault feature contains the information from raw data and implicit interactions between sensor signals. The experimental results on the three-phase flow facility and power system (PS) demonstrate the reliable and superior performance of the proposed method for fault diagnosis of complex industrial processes.