Development of Multilevel Flow Model for power plant process fault diagnosis

This paper presents the development of multilevel flow modeling (MFM)-a modeling method in means-end and part-whole way, for automatic real time fault diagnosis of power plant process failure. The MFM decomposes the complex plant process from the main goal to each component at multiple levels to represent the contribution of each component to the whole system to make clear how the main goal of the system is achieved. The plant process is described abstractly in function level by mass, energy and information flows, which represent the interaction between different components and enable the causal reasoning between functions according to the flow properties. Thus, in the abnormal status, a goal-function-component oriented fault diagnosis can be performed with the model at a very quick speed and abnormal alarms can be fully explained by the reasoning relationship of the model.