Comparison of Multivariate and Univariate Statistical Process Control and Monitoring Methods

Abstract

Work in recent years has lead to the development of multivariate process monitoring schemes which use Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This research compares the performance of a univariate scheme and a multivariate PCA scheme used for monitoring a simple process with 11 measured variables. The multivariate PCA scheme was able to adequately represent the process using two principal components. This resulted in a PCA monitoring scheme which used two charts as opposed to 11 charts for the univariate scheme and therefore had distinct advantages in terms of both data representation, presentation and fault diagnosis capabilities.