Fault detection research on novel transfer learning-based method for cross-condition, cross-system and cross-operation in public building HVAC sensors

Transfer learning (TL) has the inspiring potential for artificial intelligence in heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system with insufficient data labels. However, traditional TL-based methods are limited when applied across different conditions, systems, and operations.Unfortunately, public building HVAC systems encounter challenges related to data acquisition and richness, making it difficult to obtain data from similar HVAC systems conditions, scenarios and operations. It proposes a novel TL-based method that combines energy and mass balance constraint equation (EBCe) to diagnose the sensor faults in HVAC systems across different systems, conditions and operations.Firstly, it utilizes laboratory data as the source domain data and constructes EBCe based on the common physical laws of HVAC system to reduce the data differences between laboratory and public buildings. Then, an laplacian kernel domain-adaptive neural network (LkDaNN) is proposed to generalize more efficiently feature differences between the source domain data and target domain data. Finally, experiment analyzes the non-fault and four control-sensors fault under both cross-operation and non-cross operation conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that the EBCe-LkDaNN method achieves satisfactory fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) performance.The overall FDD accuracy of porposed method can reach 90.72 % and 88.64 % under different cross-operation, respectively. Practical application of the EBCe-LkDaNN strategy for HVAC sensor FDD are discussed at last.