Series Editors' Foreword
The topics
of
control engineering and signal processing continue to flourish and
develop.
In
common with general scientific investigation, new ideas, concepts and
interpretations emerge quite spontaneously and these are then discussed, used,
discarded or subsumed into the prevailing subject paradigm. Sometimes these
innovative concepts coalesce into a new sub-discipline within the broad subject
tapestry
of
control and signal processing. This preliminary battle between old and
new usually takes place at conferences, through the Internet and in the journals
of
the discipline. After a little more maturity has been acquired by the new concepts
then archival publication as a scientific or engineering monograph may occur.
A new concept in control and signal processing is known to have arrived when
sufficient material has developed for the topic to be taught as a specialised tutorial
workshop or as a course to undergraduates, graduates or industrial engineers. The
Advanced Textbooks
in
Control and Signal Processing Series is designed as a
vehicle for the systematic presentation
of
course material for both popular and
innovative topics in the discipline.
It
is hoped that prospective authors will
welcome the opportunity to publish a structured presentation
of
either existing
subject areas or some
of
the newer emerging control and signal processing
technologies.
Fault detection and process monitoring is one
of
the new growth areas in
process control. The reason for this development is not hard to find. New
instrumentation and communications technologies have created a wealth
of
real-
time data from processes in both new and existing manufacturing plant
installations. Process operators are therefore keen to use this data to minimise
plant downtime and optimise plant operations. The traditional routes to fault
detection were model based and to use them the process has to be well understood.
An
alternative group
of
methods has emerged which do not require the use
of
an
explicit model. This is the key basic construct for the data-driven paradigm.
Model-free and non-parametric methods for fault detection, process optimisation
and control design are currently at a particularly exciting stage
of
development.
This new advanced textbook by Chiang, Russell and Braatz primarily tackles
the data-driven routes to Fault Detection and Diagnosis.
It
is an outgrowth
of
a
prior Advances
in
Industrial Control monograph; Russell, Chiang and Braatz.
Data-driven Techniques for Fault Detection and Diagnosis
in
Chemical
Processes,
2000, ISBN 1-85233-258-1. The new textbook expands the material
of
the monograph and gives a fuller presentation
of
some
of
the alternative model-
based methods, the analytical methods, and
of
the knowledge-based techniques.
