A Novel Distributed Fault Diagnosis Scheme Toward Open-Set Scenarios Based on Extreme Value Theory

Under closed-set scenarios (CSS), distributed modeling performs well in fault diagnosis of plant-wide industrial processes due to its flexibility and robustness. However, a more realistic scenario is often open, where unseen situations may arise unexpectedly, rendering existing methods infeasible. The advent of open-set recognition algorithms that can effectively distinguish known samples and reject unknown ones bridges this gap. Nevertheless, the poor scalability of these algorithms prevents them from being elegantly embedded in popular distributed modeling schemes, which hinders the implementation of plant-wide industrial process fault diagnosis toward open-set scenarios (OSS). In this work, we formulate a novel distributed fault diagnosis scheme toward OSS to solve this problem. First, a mutual information-based local module decomposition and expansion strategy is proposed to minimize the loss of intermodule relevant information. Second, a novel generalized basic probability assignments generation technique based on extreme value theory is developed for modeling unknown information. It enables any classifier capable of probabilistic prediction to be applied to OSS and easily embedded in distributed modeling schemes. Finally, a conflict management scheme combining supervised and unsupervised is devised to address the vulnerability of the modified generalized combination rule to counter-intuitive results from fusing conflicting evidence. Experimental results on two plant-wide industrial process datasets demonstrate the proposed approach's feasibility and superiority.