The ever increasing complexity of modern systems and equipment make the task of monitoring their health quite challenging. Traditional methods such as expert defined thresholds, physics based models and process history based techniques have certain drawbacks. Thresholds defined by experts require deep knowledge about the system and are often too conservative. Physics driven approaches are costly to develop and maintain. Finally, process history based models require large amount of data that may not be available at design time of a system. Moreover, the focus of these traditional approaches has been system specific. Hence, when industrial systems are deployed on a large scale, their monitoring becomes a new challenge. Under these conditions, this paper demonstrates the use of a group-based selfmonitoring approach that learns over time from similar systems subject to similar conditions. The approach is based on conformal anomaly detection coupled with an exchangeability test that uses martingales. This allows setting a threshold value based on sound theoretical justification. A hypothesis test based on this threshold is used to decide on if a system has deviated from its group. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach through a real case study of monitoring a group of heat-pumps where it can detect a faulty hot-water switch-valve and a broken outdoor temperature sensor without previously observing these faults.

The behavior of a district heating (DH) substation has a social and operational context. The social context comes from its general usage pattern and personal requirements of building inhabitants. The operational context comes from its configuration settings which considers both the weather conditions and social requirements. The parameter estimating thermal energy demand response with respect to change in outdoor temperature conditions along with the strength of the relationship between these variables are two important measures of operational efficiency of a substation. In practice, they can be estimated using a regression model where the slope parameter measures the average response and R2 measures the strength of the relationship. These measures are also important from a monitoring perspective. However, factors related to the social context of a building and the presence of unexplained outliers can make the estimation of these measures a challenging task. Social context of a data point in DH, in many cases appears as an outlier. Data efficiency is also required if these measures are to be estimated in a timely manner. Under these circumstances, methods that can isolate and reduce the effect of outliers in a principled and data efficient manner are required. We therefore propose to use Huber regression, a robust method based on M-estimator type loss function. This method can not only identify possible outliers present in the data of each substation but also reduce their effect on the estimated slope parameter. Moreover, substations that are comparable according to certain criteria, for instance, those with almost identical energy demand levels, should have relatively similar slopes. This provides an opportunity to observe deviating substations under the assumption that comparable substations should show homogeneity in their behavior. Furthermore, the slope parameter can be compared across time to observe if the dynamics of a substation has changed. Our analysis shows that Huber regression in combination with ordinary least squares can provide reliable estimates on the operational efficiency of DH substations. © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

A typical district heating (DH) network consists of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of substations. In the absence of a well-understood prior model or data labels about each substation, the overall monitoring of such large number of substations can be challenging. To overcome the challenge, an approach based on the collective operational monitoring of each substation by a local group (i.e., the reference-group) of other similar substations in the network was formulated. Herein, if a substation of interest (i.e., the target) starts to behave differently in comparison to those in its reference-group, then it was designated as an outlier. The approach was demonstrated on the monitoring of the return temperature variable for atypical and faulty operational behavior in 778 substations associated with multi-dwelling buildings. The choice of an appropriate similarity measure along with its size k were the two important factors that enables a reference-group to effectively detect an outlier target. Thus, different similarity measures and size k for the construction of the reference-groups were investigated, which led to the selection of the Euclidean distance with k = 80. This setup resulted in the detection of 77 target substations that were outliers, i.e., the behavior of their return temperature changed in comparison to the majority of those in their respective reference-groups. Of these, 44 were detected due to the local construction of the reference-groups. In addition, six frequent patterns of deviating behavior in the return temperature of the substations were identified using the reference-group based approach, which were then further corroborated by the feedback from a DH domain expert. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd