The fault diagnosis approaches based on k-nearest neighbor rule have been widely researched for industrial processes and achieve excellent performance. However, for quality-related fault diagnosis, the approaches using k-nearest neighbor rule have been still not sufficiently studied. To tackle this problem, in this article, we propose a novel quality-related fault diagnosis framework, which is made up of two parts: fault detection and fault isolation. In the fault detection stage, we innovatively propose a novel non-linear quality-related fault detection method called kernel partial least squares- k-nearest neighbor rule, which organically incorporates k-nearest neighbor rule with kernel partial least squares. Specifically, we first employ kernel partial least squares to establish a non-linear regression model between quality variables and process variables. After that, the statistics and thresholds corresponding to process space and predicted quality space are appropriately designed by adopting k-nearest neighbor rule. In the fault isolation stage, in order to match our proposed non-linear quality-related fault detection method kernel partial least squares- k-nearest neighbor seamlessly, we propose a modified variable contributions by k-nearest neighbor (VCkNN) fault isolation method called modified variable contributions by k-nearest neighbor (MVCkNN), which elaborately introduces the idea of the accumulative relative contribution rate into VC k-nearest neighbor, such that the smearing effect caused by the normal distribution hypothesis of VC k-nearest neighbor can be mitigated effectively. Finally, a widely used numerical example and the Tennessee Eastman process are employed to verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
