Diedrich, Alexander

In many use cases cyber-physical systems are employed to produce products of small batch sizes as efficiently as possible. From an engineering standpoint, a major drawback of this flexibility is that the architecture of the cyber-physical system may change multiple times over its lifetime to accommodate new product variants. To keep a cyber-physical system working normally it has become common to employ fault diagnosis algorithms. These algorithms partly rely on physical first-principles models that need to be updated when the architecture of the system changes which usually has to be done manually. In this article we present a practical approach to obtain such a first-principles model through evaluating piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) with visual questions answering (VQA) models. We demonstrate that it is possible to leverage VQA models to construct physical equations which are a preliminary stage for the creation of models suitable for fault diagnosis. We evaluate our approach on OpenAIs GPT-4 Vision Preview model using a P&ID we created for a benchmark water tank system. Our results show that VQA models can be used to create physical first-principles models.

Cyber-physical systems are a class of technical systems that integrate mechanical components with intelligent, adaptable control devices and software. Nowadays, this integration enables high-performance, modular, and parameterized systems with high complexity, but low operating cost. Typical examples of cyber-physical systems are production machinery, cars, aeroplanes, and smart home appliances. In this thesis, the focus is on diagnosing faults within cyber-physical systems used in industrial production contexts. Faults occurring during production quickly lead to degrading product quality or production stops, which can be costly and may endanger human lives. Existing approaches to automated fault diagnosis are mostly defined on narrow use-cases or require a significant amount of expert knowledge. In this thesis, three different algorithms to automatically identify faults in cyber-physical systems are presented to mitigate these drawbacks. Therefore, this thesis makes four main contributions: (i) It introduces a novel diagnosis algorithm HySD to find faults in cyber-physical systems. (ii) It presents a new uninformed algorithm DDRC to learn diagnosis models from process data, using correlations in time-series data. (iii) It presents the new algorithm DDGD, which learns diagnosis models from time-series data supervised, using Granger Causality. (iv) It provides a novel theory to describe fault propagation in cyber-physical systems. More precise, the algorithm HySD uses satisfiability modulo linear arithmetic to combine process data with traditional symbolic consistency-based diagnosis algorithms. However, the algorithm heavily relies on models formulated by experts. Therefore, the algorithms DDRC and DDGD are introduced to learn diagnosis models from process data automatically. All algorithms build on the foundation of the theory of fault propagation. The algorithms were evaluated on internationally accepted benchmarks of tank systems, the well-known Tennessee Eastman Process, and two industrial use-cases. Throughout all empirical results, the algorithms exhibit good performance in learning suitable models and in diagnosing faults in synthetic and real fault scenarios.