A novel ensemble clustering for operational transients classification with application to a nuclear power plant turbine

Abstract

The objective of the present work is to develop a novel approach for combining in an ensemble multiple base clusterings of operational transients of industrial equipment, when the number of clusters in the final consensus clustering is unknown. A measure of pairwise similarity is used to quantify the co-association matrix that describes the similarity among the different base clusterings. Then, a Spectral Clustering technique of literature, embedding the unsupervised K-Means algorithm, is applied to the coassociation matrix for finding the optimum number of clusters of the final consensus clustering, based on Silhouette validity index calculation. The proposed approach is developed with reference to an artificial case study, properly designed to mimic the signal trend behavior of a Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) turbine during shut-down. The results of the artificial case have been compared with those achieved by a state-of-art approach, known as Clusterbased Similarity Partitioning and Serial Graph Partitioning and Fill-reducing Matrix Ordering Algorithms (CSPAMETIS). The comparison shows that the proposed approach is able to identify a final consensus clustering that classifies the transients with better accuracy and robustness compared to the CSPA-METIS approach. The approach is, then, validated on an industrial case concerning 149 shut-down transients of a NPP turbine.