Alarm prediction in industrial machines using autoregressive LS-SVM models

In industrial machines different alarms are embedded in machines controllers. They make use of sensors and machine states to indicate to end-users various information (e.g. diagnostics or need of maintenance) or to put machines in a specific mode (e.g. shut-down when thermal protection is activated). More specifically, the alarms are often triggered based on comparing sensors data to a threshold defined in the controllers software. In batch production machines, triggering an alarm (e.g. thermal protection) in the middle of a batch production is crucial for the quality of the produced batch and results into a high production loss. This situation can be avoided if the settings of the production machine (e.g. production speed) is adjusted accordingly based on the temperature monitoring. Therefore, predicting a temperature alarm and adjusting the production speed to avoid triggering the alarm seems logical. In this paper we show the effectiveness of Least Squares Support Vector Machines (LS-SVMs) in predicting the evolution of the temperature in a steel production machine and, as a consequence, possible alarms due to overheating. Firstly, in an offline fashion, we develop a nonlinear autoregressive (NAR) model, where a systematic model selection procedure allows to carefully tune the model parameters. Afterwards, the NAR model is used online to forecast the future temperature trend. Finally, a classifier which uses as input the outcomes of the NAR model allows to foresee future alarms.