Reliability and Maintainability of In-Service Pipelines helps engineers understand the best structural analysis methods and more accurately predict the life of their pipeline assets. Expanded to cover real case studies from oil and gas, sewer and water pipes, this reference also explains inline inspection and how the practice influences reliability analysis, along with various reliability models beyond the well-known Monte Carlo method. Encompassing both numerical and analytical methods in structural reliability analysis, this book gives engineers a stronger point of reference covering both pipeline maintenance and monitoring techniques in a single resource. Provides tactics on cost-effective pipeline integrity management decisions and strategy for a variety of different pipes Presents readers with rational tools for strengthening and rehabing existing pipelines Teaches how to optimize materials selection and design parameters for designing future pipelines with a longer service life

This book provides the most up-to-date, advanced methods and tools for risk assessment of onshore pipelines. These methods and tools are based primarily on information collected from ILI measurements and additional information about the soil surrounding the pipeline. The book provides a better understanding how the defects grow and interact (repulsion or attraction) and their spatial variability. In addition, the authors contemplate new defects that evolve between inspections and how they could affect the pipeline's reliability. A real-world case is presented to reinforce the concepts presented in the book. The book is structured into three parts: i) an introduction to onshore pipelines and the problem of corrosion, ii) a framework that deals with uncertainty for integrity programs for corroded pipelines, and iii) the applications of the methods presented in the book. The book is ideal for researchers and field engineers in oil and gas transportation and graduate and undergraduate engineering students interested in pipeline reliability assessments, spatial variability, and risk-based inspections.

The book contains solutions to fundamental problems which arise due to the logic of development of specific branches of science, which are related to pipeline safety, but mainly are subordinate to the needs of pipeline transportation. The book deploys important but not yet solved aspects of reliability and safety assurance of pipeline systems, which are vital aspects not only for the oil and gas industry and, in general, fuel and energy industries , but also to virtually all contemporary industries and technologies. The volume will be useful to specialists and experts in the field of diagnostics/ inspection, monitoring, reliability and safety of critical infrastructures. First and foremost, it will be useful to the decision making persons —operators of different types of pipelines, pipeline diagnostics/inspection vendors, and designers of in-line –inspection (ILI) tools, industrial and ecological safety specialists, as well as to researchers and graduate students.

As the most frequent failure source, external corrosion has led to more than 1700 failures in gas transmission pipelines in US since 1996, causing a property damage of approximately $189M. Such numbers highlight the importance of maintaining gas transmission pipelines in safe conditions to postpone corrosion failures. As the most widely applied method of corrosion monitoring technique, in-line inspection is expensive and time-consuming due to requiring high frequencies. On the other hand, the recent efforts directed towards developing failure prediction or maintenance planning models for oil and gas pipelines seem to have some limitations. As such, most of the failure prediction models are based on limited number of inspection or historical records or are limited in application due to their subjectivity. Furthermore, in the domain of maintenance planning, the current procedures are merely based on considering the associated costs and safety thresholds in the decision-making process. Such methodologies do not address the importance of pipeline availability and continuation of operation as a critical asset in the selection of the maintenance strategy. This research has two main objectives. As the first objective, the proposed research aims to develop historical data-based failure prediction models for gas transmission pipelines by considering geo-environmental features. As the second objective, this research aims to propose a reliability-centered availability-based maintenance planning framework that considers the criticality of pipeline operation. For these objectives, a detailed literature review was carried out on current methodologies to predict failures in oil and gas pipelines and maintain them. As the most important limitations, current failure prediction models do not consider geographical and environmental properties of pipelines to predict failures. On the other hand, in maintenance planning scope, none of current practices highlight importance of pipeline operation and availability in making the proper decision. In addition, these methodologies are often subjective, i.e. they are merely applicable to limited pipelines. To overcome these limitations the mentioned objectives of this research were defined and failure and maintenance data were collected from accessible historical records and reports. The failure prediction models were developed from best-subset and multiple regression analyses on the historical failure data and were then validated. On the other hand, the maintenance planning framework was developed from a coupled cost and availability-based maintenance planning procedure on different maintenance scenarios. For each scenario, a discrete event simulation was carried out through MATLAB programming. Such simulation was performed on the pipeline reliability profile obtained from a Monte Carlo simulation and consideration of improvement in availability per unit cost as the decision criteria. Monte Carlo simulation was carried out to consider wide range of design parameters for development of the reliability profile. The developed failure prediction models were able to satisfactory predict time of corrosion failures in gas transmission pipelines for Great Plains and South East Regions of the U.S. These models were validated with mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.12 and 0.04, for Great Plains, and 0.11 and 0.07, for South East regional classifications, respectively. The proposed maintenance planning framework reveals that for a case study of a 24-inch pipeline, considering an availability-cost indicator, the second maintenance scenario, with interventions at the service life of 30.1 and 40.5 years is more effective. This order is followed by the first scenario with interventions at service life of 33.3 and 42.2 years, and finally the third scenario with intervention at service life of 24.2 years, respectively. The developed failure prediction models can assist decision makers and pipeline operators to predict the expected time of corrosion failure in gas transmission pipelines in the selected regions by considering geo-environmental and pipeline design parameters. In addition, for maintenance planning of oil and gas pipelines, this research proposes a novel methodology that considers oil and gas pipelines as critical assets for which continued operation is of high importance. Such consideration provides a compensation between the costs incurred and pipeline availability to avoid over/under maintenance.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of 13 international workshops held as part of OTM 2008 in Monterrey, Mexico, in November 2008. The 106 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 171 submissions to the workshops. The volume starts with 19 additional revised poster papers of the OTM 2008 main conferences CoopIS and ODBASE. Topics of the workshop papers are ambient data integration (ADI 2008), agents and web services merging in distributed environment (AWeSoMe 2008), community-based evolution of knowledge-intensive systems (COMBEK 2008), enterprise integration, interoperability and networking (EI2N 2008), system/software architectures (IWSSA 2008), mobile and networking technologies for social applications (MONET 2008), ontology content and evaluation in enterprise & quantitative semantic methods for the internet (OnToContent and QSI 2008), object-role modeling (ORM 2008), pervasive systems (PerSys 2008), reliability in decentralized distributed systems (RDDS 2008), semantic extensions to middleware enabling large scale knowledge (SEMELS 2008), and semantic Web and Web semantics (SWWS 2008).

The development of oil and gas fields offshore requires specialized pipeline equipment. The structures must be strong enough to with stand the harshest environments, and ensure that production is not interrupted and remains economically feasible. However, recent events in the Gulf of Mexico have placed a new importance on maintenance and reliability. A new section; Condition Based Maintenance (CBM), introduces the subject of maintenance, written by Tian Ran Lin, Queensland University of Technology, and Yong Sun, CSIRO Earth Science and Resource Engineering. Two of the main objectives of CBM is maximizing reliability while preventing major or minor equipment malfunction and minimizing maintenance costs. In this new section, the authors deal with the multi-objective condition based maintenance optimization problem. CBM provides two major advantages: (1) an efficient approach for weighting maintenance objectives, and (2) a method for specifying physical methods for achieving those objectives. Maintenance cost and reliability objectives are calculated based on proportional hazards model and a control limit CBM replacement policy. Written primarily for engineers and management personnel working on offshore and deepwater oil and gas pipelines, this book covers the fundamentals needed to design, Install, and commission pipeline projects. This new section along with a thorough update of the existing chapters represents a 30% increase in information over the previous edition. Covers offshore maintenance and maintenance support system Provides the fundamentals needed to design, Install, and commission pipeline project Methods and tools to deliver cost effective maintenance cost and system reliability New section on Condition-Based Maintenance written by Tian Ran Lin, Queensland University of Technology, and Yong Sun, CSIRO Earth Science and Resource Engineering ([email protected])