Since a large amount of data can be obtained in the oil production process nowadays and the operation environment is increasingly complicated, it is necessary to research unsupervised and robust fault detection methods for improving safety. In this paper, an online Bayesian-based technique with a novel decision fusion algorithm is proposed for unsupervised fault detection in the pumping unit. First, a new strategy to detect the working condition of the pumping unit by dynamometer card as well as five process measured variables is proposed. To deal with high-dimension data and outliers in dynamometer card, a robust Douglas-Peucker algorithm is developed for obtaining compressed data. A chord ratio index evaluating deviation degree of observations is defined, which can be used for removing outliers during approximation. Two norms are introduced for choosing the threshold in the proposed Douglas-Peucker algorithm. Moreover, a Bayesian-based online change point detection model is attempted for detecting univariate faults in the pumping unit. A decision fusion method derived from Bayesian probability formula is proposed for fusing univariate fault detection results. At last, the power of the proposed method is evaluated by numerical simulations and a real oil production process.

This work is published on IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL 21.19(2021):21829-21838.