A new on-line batch process monitoring and diagnosing approach based on Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA) was proposed. This method does not need to predict the future observations of variables, so it is more sensitive to fault detection and stronger implement for monitoring. In order to improve the monitoring performance,the variables trajectories of batch process are separated into several blocks. The key to the proposed approach for on-line monitoring is to calculate the distance of block data that project to low-dimension Fisher space between new batch and reference batch. Comparing the distance with the predefine threshold, it can be considered whether the batch process is normal or abnormal. Fault diagnosis is performed based on the weights in fault direction calculated by FDA. The proposed method was applied to the simulation model of fed-batch penicillin fermentation and the results were compared with those obtained using MPCA. The simulation results clearly show that the on-line monitoring method based on FDA is more efficient than the MPCA.