Soft Sensor Based on Relevance Vector Machines for Microbiological Fermentation

摘要

Microbiological fermentation is a type of complicated batch process that is severely nonlinear and time variant system. Many process parameters are required to be monitored and controlled in order to make the microbiological fermentation process successful. Therefore, it is particularly important to measure the process variables, however the instrumentation and sensors available for fermentation control do not cover all the desirable or necessary measurements. In fermentation processes, many important internal variables cannot be measured. Soft sensor has become an indispensable method that measures internal variables in fermentation processes. In this paper, the relevance vector machine has been shown to provide an effective method for constructing a soft sensor for microbiological fermentation. The results obtained have demonstrated that the relevance vector machine soft sensor can estimate the internal variables in fermentation process.