Rapid and effective decision-making is crucial during drinking water contamination events to ensure public safety. This paper examines a case study where a water utility, responding to customer complaints, suspected wastewater contamination in its network. We compare the traditional expert judgement approach to a model-based approach using the PathoINVEST tool. The tool performs simulations of contamination events informed by sensor measurements, identifies contamination sources using sampling results, and suggests optimal valve closures for mitigation. Our findings show that the model-based approach significantly enhances response efficiency and accuracy. It identified the contamination source with four samples in 1.3 h, compared to 11 samples in 3.7 h for the traditional approach, and resulted in a lower infection risk (12% versus 20%) at the time of source identification. Regarding valve closure, the model-based approach performed better, resulting in a 3%-point reduction in infection risk compared to the traditional approach. Modeling uncertainty is addressed by considering valve settings uncertainty; despite a 0.7% discrepancy in valve settings compared to the model, the tool accurately pinpointed the contamination vicinity 75% of the time. These findings support the claim that integrating modeling and sensor tools into emergency response protocols for drinking water contamination events can improve early identification and mitigation, potentially safeguarding public health in urban water supply systems.

Pathogen intrusion in drinking water systems can pose severe health risks. To better prepare in planning and responding to such events, computational models that capture the intrusion and health impact dynamics are needed. This study presents a novel benchmark testbed that integrates current knowledge on pathogen transport and fate in chlorinated systems and can assess infection risk from contamination events. The model considers organic matter degradation, chlorine decay mechanisms, pathogen inactivation kinetics, as well as stochastic water demands. We studied modeling of wastewater intrusion events that can occur anywhere within a chlorinated and non-chlorinated network. We applied the Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment framework focusing on three pathogens: enterovirus, Campylobacter, and Cryptosporidium, and their respective dose-response models. Synthetic household-level water demand time series were used to model the individual water consumption timing and calculate the infection risk (exposure via ingestion). Model outcomes indicate that while chlorination aids mitigation, larger contaminations can still lead to infections due to chlorine resistance (for Cryptosporidium) and chlorine depletion at the contamination point. In our example scenarios, chlorine-susceptible pathogens infected 0.78–26.6% of the downstream population, while chlorine-resistant ones infected the entire downstream population. Enterovirus infection risk is higher, despite the concentrations in the contamination source being lower, due to the lower susceptibility to chlorine than Campylobacter. In non-chlorinated networks, the modeled wastewater contamination events led to 11–46% infection risk in the total population, depending on the contamination location. Hydraulic uncertainty had a limited influence on infection risk. Furthermore, Campylobacter's infection risk is more sensitive to the initial concentration in the contamination source whereas enterovirus infection risk to the inactivation rate. The model further indicates that the time window for effective mitigation of the magnitude of a waterborne outbreak is short (within hours).

In a desktop exercise, a water utility’s emergency response to suspected wastewater contamination in a drinking water network was compared with a model-based approach using PathoINVEST. This tool simulates contamination scenarios and assists with locating the source of contamination using sampling results. The sampling procedure used a portable sensor that offers rapid (20 min time-to-result) screening of fecal contamination. Preliminary results show that the model-based approach is able to find the contamination source faster and with fewer samples than current practices. Integrating modeling and rapid sensor tools in emergency responses improves decision-making and public health protection in drinking water networks.

A key challenge in designing algorithms for leakage detection and isolation in drinking water distribution systems is the performance evaluation and comparison between methodologies using benchmarks. For this purpose, the Battle of the Leakage Detection and Isolation Methods (BattLeDIM) competition was organized in 2020 with the aim to objectively compare the performance of methods for the detection and localization of leakage events, relying on supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) measurements of flow and pressure sensors installed within a virtual water distribution system. Several teams from academia and the industry submitted their solutions using various techniques including time series analysis, statistical methods, machine learning, mathematical programming, met-heuristics, and engineering judgment, and were evaluated using realistic economic criteria. This paper summarizes the results of the competition and conducts an analysis of the different leakage detection and isolation methods used by the teams. The competition results highlight the need for further development of methods for leakage detection and isolation, and also the need to develop additional open benchmark problems for this purpose.

The enormous energy use of the building sector and the requirements for indoor living quality that aim to improve occupants'productivity and health, prioritize Smart Buildings as an emerging technology. The Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning ( HVAC ) system is considered one of the most critical and essential parts in buildings since it consumes the largest amount of energy and is responsible for humans comfort. Due to the intermittent operation of HVAC systems, faults are more likely to occur, possibly increasing eventually building's energy consumption and - or downgrading indoor living quality. The complexity and large scale nature of HVAC systems complicate the diagnosis of faults in a centralized framework. This paper presents a distributed intelligent fault diagnosis algorithm for detecting and isolating multiple sensor faults in large-scale HVAC systems. Modeling the HVAC system as a network of interconnected subsystems allows the design of a set of distributed sensor fault diagnosis agents capable of isolating multiple sensor faults by applying a combinatorial decision logic and diagnostic reasoning. The performance of the proposed method is investigated with respect to robustness, fault detectability and scalability. Simulations are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the presence of multiple sensor faults applied to a 83-zone HVAC system and to evaluate the sensitivity of the method with respect to sensor noise variance.

Indoor Air Quality monitoring is an essential ingredient of intelligent buildings. The release of various airborne contaminants into the buildings, compromises the health and safety of occupants. Therefore, early contaminant detection is of paramount importance for the timely activation of proper contingency plans in order to minimize the impact of contaminants on occupants health. The objective of this work is to enhance the performance of a distributed contaminant detection methodology, in terms of the minimum detectable contaminant release rates, by considering the joint problem of partitioning selection and observer gain design. Towards this direction, a detectability analysis is performed to derive appropriate conditions for the minimum guaranteed detectable contaminant release rate for specific partitioning configuration and observer gains. The derived detectability conditions are then exploited to formulate and solve an optimization problem for jointly selecting the partitioning configuration and observer gains that yield the best contaminant detection performance.

This paper presents a distributed methodology for controlling multi-zone Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems and a fault accommodation scheme for reconfiguring the distributed controller in the presence of unknown sensor faults. The multi-zone HVAC system is modelled as a network of interconnected subsystems representing the temperature dynamics of the storage tank and the various building zones. The distributed control scheme for each subsystem is based on local measurements, as well as measurements from neighboring subsystems. In the presence of a sensor fault, an accommodation scheme is designed by adaptively estimating and compensating the effect of the sensor fault. The estimation of the local sensor fault is exploited not only by the local but also by neighboring controllers to reduce fault propagation effects resulting from the distributed control architecture. Under certain conditions, the closed-loop stability of the multi-zone HVAC system is analyzed in the presence of modeling uncertainty and measurement noise, under both healthy conditions and faulty sensor measurements. Simulation results are used to illustrate the proposed distributed sensor fault accommodation scheme.

The automatic preservation of the indoor air quality (IAQ) is an important task of the intelligent building design in order to ensure the health and safety of the occupants. The IAQ, however, is often compromised by various airborne contaminants that penetrate the indoor environment as a result of accidents or planned attacks. In this paper, we provide the detailed analysis, implementation, and evaluation of a distributed methodology for detecting and isolating multiple contaminant events in large-scale buildings. Specifically, we consider the building as a collection of interconnected subsystems, and we design a contaminant event monitoring software agent for each subsystem. Each monitoring agent aims to detect the contaminant and isolate the zone where the contaminant source is located, while it is allowed to exchange information with its neighboring agents. For configuring the subsystems, we implement both exact and heuristic partitioning solutions. A main contribution of this paper is the investigation of the impact of the partitioning solution on the performance of the distributed contaminant detection and isolation (CDI) scheme with respect to the detectability and isolability of the contaminant sources. The performance of the proposed distributed CDI methodology is demonstrated using the models of real building case studies created on CONTAM.^{1 1}CONTAM is a multizone simulation program developed by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

This paper presents an optimization methodology for the design of an observer-based sensor fault detection scheme for a class of nonlinear systems. Taking into account bounded system disturbances and measurement noise, we design an observer aiming at maximizing the set of faults that are guaranteed to be strongly detectable. Strong fault detectability conditions are derived based on the limit sets that bound the residual under healthy and faulty conditions. A novel optimization method is designed based on the separation of the healthy and faulty limit sets. The distance between these sets represents the trade-off between robustness and sensor fault sensitivity. Simulation results are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology applied to a simple example of a flexible link robot.

This paper proposes a distributed fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme that can preserve thermal comfort conditions in a multi-zone building despite the presences of faulty temperature sensors. The proposed methodology exploits the networked structure of a Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) system controlling the temperature of physically interconnected zones in order to design a distributed FTC control scheme comprised of a set of dedicated control agents. For each control agent, two adaptive bounds on the tracking error are derived, taking into account: (i) healthy sensor measurements and (ii) a single sensor fault. Each adaptive bound constitutes a condition that allows the selection of an appropriate local control gain such that the thermal comfort conditions are satisfied. By utilizing the decisions of a sensor fault diagnosis scheme, the controller gain can be reconfigured to compensate the effects of sensor faults. The proposed methodology is illustrated by simulating a sensor fault in a 3-zone HVAC system.

This paper develops a performance index that can be used to find the optimal design parameters of the observer-based residual generator and adaptive threshold of a fault detection scheme for a class of nonlinear systems. The performance of the fault detection scheme is analyzed with respect to the fault detectability of incipient sensor faults, which depends on the dynamic behavior of the residual and the adaptive threshold generator. The proposed performance index is based on the distance between two limit sets that are guaranteed to include the residual under fault-free and faulty conditions. The novelty of this distance metric stems from the parametrization of the limit sets in relation to (i) the design parameters of both the residual generator and adaptive threshold, (ii) the bounds on the system disturbances and measurement noise, and (iii) the fault function and evolution rate. An optimization problem is formulated for finding the design parameters of the fault detection scheme such that the set of guaranteed strongly detectable faults is maximized, where this set is defined based on the distance between the separated fault-free and faulty limit set.

Networked systems present some key new challenges in the development of fault-diagnosis architectures. This paper proposes a novel distributed networked fault detection methodology for large-scale interconnected systems. The proposed formulation incorporates a synchronization methodology with a filtering approach in order to reduce the effect of measurement noise and time delays on the fault detection performance. The proposed approach allows the monitoring of multirate systems, where asynchronous and delayed measurements are available. This is achieved through the development of a virtual sensor scheme with a model-based resynchronization algorithm and a delay compensation strategy for distributed fault-diagnostic units. The monitoring architecture exploits an adaptive approximator with learning capabilities for handling uncertainties in the interconnection dynamics. A consensus-based estimator with time-varying weights is introduced, for improving fault detectability in the case of variables shared among more than one subsystem. Furthermore, time-varying threshold functions are designed to prevent false-positive alarms. Analytical fault detectability sufficient conditions are derived, and extensive simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the distributed fault detection technique.

This paper presents a model-based methodology for diagnosing actuator and sensor faults affecting the temperature dynamics of a multi-zone heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) system. By considering the temperature dynamics of the HVAC system as a network of interconnected subsystems, a distributed fault diagnosis architecture is proposed. For every subsystem, we design a monitoring agent that combines local and transmitted information from its neighboring agents in order to provide a decision on the type, number and location of the faults. The diagnosis process of each agent is realized in three steps. Firstly, the agent performs fault detection using a distributed nonlinear estimator. After the detection, the local fault identification is activated to infer the type of the fault using two distributed adaptive estimation schemes and a combinatorial decision logic. In order to distinguish between multiple local faults and propagated sensor faults, a distributed fault isolation is applied using the decisions of the neighboring agents. Simulation results of a 5-zone HVAC system are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

This tutorial investigates the problem of the occurrence of multiple faults in the sensors used to monitor and control a network of cyberphysical systems. The goal is to formulate a general methodology, which will be used for designing sensor fault diagnosis schemes with emphasis on the isolation of multiple sensor faults, and for analyzing the performance of these schemes with respect to the design parameters and system characteristics. The backbone of the proposed methodology is the design of several monitoring and aggregation cyber agents (modules) with specific properties and tasks. The monitoring agents check the healthy operation of sets of sensors and infer the occurrence of faults in these sensor sets based on structured robustness and sensitivity properties. These properties are obtained by deriving analytical redundancy relations of observer-based residuals sensitive to specific subsets of sensor faults, and adaptive thresholds that bound the residuals under healthy conditions, assuming bounded modeling uncertainty and measurement noise. The aggregation agents are employed to collect and process the decisions of the agents, while they apply diagnostic reasoning to isolate combinations of sensor faults that have possibly occurred. The design and performance analysis methodology is presented in the context of three different architectures: for cyber-physical systems that consist of a set of interconnected systems, a distributed architecture and a decentralized architecture, and for cyber-physical systems that are treated as monolithic, a centralized architecture. For all three architectures, the decomposition of the sensor set into subsets of sensors plays a key role in their ability to isolate multiple sensor faults. A discussion of the challenges and benefits of the three architectures is provided, based on the system scale, the type of system nonlinearities, the number of sensors and the communication needs. Lastly, this tutorial concludes with a discussion of open problems in fault diagnosis.

The objective of this work is to analyze the performance of the local monitoring modules of a distributed diagnosis scheme tailored to detect multiple sensor faults in a class of nonlinear systems. The local modules monitor the healthy operation of subsets of sensors (local sensor sets). Every module is designed to detect the occurrence of faults in the local sensor sets when some analytical redundancy relations (ARRs) are violated. The set of ARRs is formulated using structured residuals and adaptive thresholds based on a nonlinear observer. In order to characterize the sensitivity of every monitoring module to local sensor faults, we obtain structural fault detectability conditions based on adaptive thresholds, and strong fault detectability conditions based on ultimate robust positively invariant sets. These conditions correspond to explicit relationships between the local sensor faults, the worst-case bounds on modeling uncertainties and the design parameters of the local monitoring module.

This paper presents a model-based distributed scheme with emphasis on the isolation of sensor faults in multi-zone heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. A bank of local sensor fault detection and isolation agents are designed to diagnose sensor faults in a HVAC system, modeled as a set of interconnected, nonlinear subsystems. Each agent consists of the local sensor fault detection and adaptive estimation scheme for isolation of sensor faults. Detection and isolation signals are generated based on analytical redundancy relations. These signals are provided to a local decision logic in order to distinguish between local and propagated sensor faults. Simulation results are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology applied to a four-zone HVAC system.

The paper deals with the problem of defining the optimal topology for a distributed fault detection architecture for non-linear large-scale systems. A stochastic modelbased framework for diagnosis is formulated. The system structural graph is decomposed into subsystems and each subsystem is monitored by one local diagnoser. It is shown that overlapping of subsystems allows to improve the detectability properties of the monitoring architecture. Based on this theoretical result, an optimal decomposition design method is proposed, able to define the minimum number of detection units needed to guarantee the detectability of certain faults while minimizing the communication costs subject to some computation cost constraints. An algorithmic procedure is presented to solve the proposed optimal decomposition problem. Preliminary simulation results show the potential of the proposed approach.

This paper presents a design and analysis methodology for detecting and isolating multiple sensor faults in heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. The proposed methodology is developed in a distributed framework, considering a multizone HVAC system as a set of interconnected nonlinear subsystems. A dedicated local sensor fault diagnosis (LSFD) agent is designed for each subsystem, while it may exchange information with other LSFD agents. Distributed sensor fault detection is conducted using robust analytical redundancy relations of estimation-based residuals and adaptive thresholds. The distributed sensor fault isolation procedure is carried out by combining the decisions of the LSFD agents and applying a reasoning-based decision logic. The performance of the proposed methodology is analyzed with respect to robustness, sensor fault detectability, and isolability. Simulation results are used for illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed methodology applied to an eight-zone HVAC system.

This paper presents the design and analysis of a methodology for detecting and isolating multiple sensor faults in large-scale interconnected nonlinear systems. The backbone of the proposed decentralized methodology is the design of a local sensor fault diagnosis agent dedicated to each interconnected subsystem, without the need to communicate with neighboring agents. Each local sensor fault diagnosis agent is responsible for detecting and isolating multiple faults in the local set of sensors. The local sensor fault diagnosis agent consists of a bank of modules that monitor smaller groups of sensors in the corresponding local sensor set. The detection of faults in each of the sensor groups is conducted using robust analytical redundancy relations, formulated by structured residuals and adaptive thresholds. The multiple sensor fault isolation in each local sensor fault diagnosis agent is realized by aggregating the decisions of the modules and applying a diagnostic reasoning-based decision logic. The performance of the proposed diagnostic scheme is analyzed with respect to sensor fault detectability and multiple sensor fault isolability. A simulation example of two interconnected robot manipulators is used to illustrate the application of the multiple sensor fault detection and isolation methodology.

This paper proposes a distributed methodology for detecting and isolating multiple sensor faults in interconnected cyberphysical systems. The distributed sensor fault detection and isolation process is conducted in the cybersuperstratum, in two levels. The first-level diagnosis is based on the design of monitoring agents, where every agent is dedicated to a corresponding interconnected subsystem. The monitoring agent is designed to isolate multiple sensor faults occurring in the sensor set of the physical part, while it is allowed to exchange information with its neighboring monitoring agents. The second-level diagnosis is realized by applying a global decision logic designed to isolate multiple sensor faults that may propagate in the cybersuperstratum through the exchange of information between monitoring agents. The decision-making process, executed in both levels of diagnosis, relies on a multiple sensor fault combinatorial logic and diagnostic reasoning. The performance of the proposed methodology is analyzed with respect to the sensor fault propagation effects and the distributed sensor fault detectability.