Attention-based multiscale temporal fusion network for uncertain-mode fault diagnosis in multimode processes

Fault diagnosis in multimode processes plays a critical role in ensuring the safe operation of industrial systems across multiple modes. It faces a great challenge yet to be addressed – that is, the significant distributional differences among monitoring data from multiple modes make it difficult for the models to extract shared feature representations related to system health conditions. In response to this problem, this paper introduces a novel method called attention-based multiscale temporal fusion network. The multiscale depthwise convolution and gated recurrent unit are employed to extract multiscale contextual local features and long-short-term features. Instance normalization is applied to suppress mode-specific information. Furthermore, a temporal attention mechanism is designed to focus on critical time points with higher cross-mode shared information, thereby enhancing the accuracy of fault diagnosis. The proposed model is applied to Tennessee Eastman process dataset and three-phase flow facility dataset. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior diagnostic performance and maintains a small model size. The source code will be available on GitHub at https://github.com/GuangqiangLi/AMTFNet.