System and Method for Creation and Detection of Process Fingerprints for Monitoring in a Process Plant

A method for the identification of a situation of interest comprising:

• activating a set of process fingerprints based on hulls of a set of reference process variables;
• loading the activated set of fingerprints into a processor;
• acquiring process data from one or more process data sources;
• calculating the distance between the acquired process data and one or more of the activated set of fingerprints;
• and
• comparing the calculated distance to a threshold value to determine whether a situation of interest represented by one or more of the activated set fingerprint is present.

A system for the identification of a situation of interest comprising:

• at least one process data source for selecting a set of reference process variables over a reference time period;
• a data processing device for creating a fingerprint by calculating hulls for the selected set of process data over the reference time period;
• a storage device for storing the fingerprint;
• and
• a management device for acquiring process data from at least one of the process data sources and calculating the distance between the acquired process data and the fingerprint.