Reservoir Computing for Detection of Steady State in Performance Tests of Compressors

Fabrication of devices in industrial plants often includes undergoing quality assurance tests or tests that seek to determine some attributes or capacities of the device. For instance, in testing refrigeration compressors, we want to find the true refrigeration capacity of the compressor being tested. Such test (also called an episode) may take up to four hours, being an actual hindrance to applying it to the total number of compressors produced. This work seeks to reduce the time spent on such industrial trials by employing Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) as dynamical models for detecting when a test is entering the so-called steady-state region. Specifically, we use Reservoir Computing (RC) networks which simplify the learning of RNNs by speeding up training time and showing convergence to a global optimum. Also, this work proposes a self-organized subspace projection method for RC networks which uses information from the beginning of the episode to define a cluster to which the episode belongs to. This assigned cluster defines a particular binary input that shifts the operating point of the reservoir to a subspace of trajectories for the duration of the episode. This method is shown to turn the RC model robust in performance with respect to varying combination of reservoir parameters, such as spectral radius and leak rate, when compared to a standard RC network.