Fault detection and diagnosis is an important problem in process engineering. It is the central component of abnormal event management (AEM) which has attracted a lot of attention recently. AEM deals with the timely detection, diagnosis and correction of abnormal conditions of faults in a process. Early detection and diagnosis of process faults while the. plant is still operating in a controllable region can help avoid abnormal event progression and reduce productivity loss. Since the petrochemical industries lose an estimated 20 billion dollars every year, they have rated AEM as their number one problem that needs to be solved. Hence, there is considerable interest in this field now from industrial practitioners as well as academic researchers, as opposed to a decade or so ago. There is an abundance of literature on process fault diagnosis ranging from analytical methods to artificial intelligence and statistical approaches. From a modelling perspective, there are methods that require accurate process models, semi-quantitative models, or qualitative models. At the other end of the spectrum, there are methods that do not assume any form of model information and rely only on historic process data. In addition, given the process knowledge, there are different search techniques that can be applied to perform diagnosis. Such a collection of bewildering array of methodologies and alternatives often poses a difficult challenge to any aspirant who is not a specialist in these techniques. Some of these ideas seem so far apart from one another that a non-expert researcher or practitioner is often left wondering about the suitability of a method for his or her diagnostic situation. While there have been some excellent reviews in this field in the past, they often focused on a particular branch, such as analytical models, of this broad discipline. The basic aim of this three part series of papers is to provide a systematic and comparative study of various diagnostic methods from different perspectives. We broadly classify fault diagnosis methods into three general categories and review them in three parts. They are quantitative model-based methods, qualitative model-based methods, and process history based methods. In the first part of the series, the problem of fault diagnosis is introduced and approaches based on quantitative models are reviewed. In the remaining two parts, methods based on qualitative models and process history data are reviewed. Furthermore, these disparate methods will be compared and evaluated based on a common set of criteria introduced in the first part of the series. We conclude the series with a discussion on the relationship of fault diagnosis to other process operations and on emerging trends such as hybrid blackboard -based frameworks for fault diagnosis. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.