An approach for Fault Diagnosis based on bio-inspired strategies

In this work we present a study on the application of bio-inspired strategies for optimization to Fault Diagnosis in industrial systems. The principal aim is to establish a basis for the development of new and viable model-based Fault Diagnosis Methods which improve some difficulties that the current methods cannot avoid. These difficulties are related with fault sensitivity and robustness to external disturbances. To get start the study, we consider the Differential Evolution and the Ant Colony Optimization algorithms. This application is illustrated using simulation data of the Two Tanks System benchmark. In order to analyze the merits of these algorithms to obtain a diagnosis which needs to be sensitive to faults and robust to external disturbances, some experiments with incipient faults and noisy data have been simulated. The results indicate that the proposed approach, basically the combination of the two algorithms, characterizes a promising methodology for Fault Diagnosis.