Model-based information fusion investigation on fault isolation of subsea systems considering the interaction among subsystems and sensors

The offshore oil industry has expanded to deep water and Arctic. The harsh operating conditions (e.g., ice and strong wind) and increasing complicated system raise the occurrence likelihood of system faults. This requires timely fault isolation and management in the subsea system. However, the offshore oil industry mainly relies on humans to isolate faults based on alarms. With harsh operating conditions and increasing complicated system, this industry urgently needs research on more efficient fault isolation and cause diagnosis methods. Unfortunately, limited research is conducted on fault isolation method in the offshore oil industry. Furthermore, in industry 4.0 era, large amounts of information are obtained. This provides precondition for the application of information fusion technique which aims to improve diagnosis results. However, to the authors’ knowledge, information fusion has not been much studied in the fault isolation of the offshore oil industry. Moreover, the interaction of different subsystems contains valuable information. How the interaction of different subsystems can influence the fault diagnosis has not been explored. This paper proposes a Bayesian network (BN) based method for timely fault isolation and cause diagnosis for the offshore oil industry. The work fuses different information, and it also includes the dependency among different subsystems in the fault diagnosis. As an important alarm source, false alarms are also taken into account in the model. A case study on the subject of the subsea wellhead and chemical injection systems is conducted to demonstrate the functions and merits of the proposed method.