Development of Hybrid Component Models for Online Monitoring of Complex Dynamic Systems

Abstract

Up to now model-based online monitoring is rarely applied in process automation and chemical industries. The main reason is the big effort, which is necessary to develop a comprehensive model for a technical system under various circumstances. However the growing complexity of plants and facilities requires increasingly the use of formal methods to analyze and to monitor the system behavior.

In this paper an online monitoring method based on qualitative models and combined with dynamic models is proposed. The qualitative description is very flexible in representing just as much information as it is actually needed and available. In that way also complex systems can be modeled. The dynamic description is only necessary for time dependent components. As a result dynamic systems can also be modeled.

The component-oriented approach is a basic feature of the method. Its ability to build automatically clusters of qualitative and dynamic components, which can be reused as single components, is very important.

An application example of a three-tank-system shows that such kind of models, the socalled hybrid models, are capable of solving monitoring problems.