Decision Making for Long-Term Pipeline System Repair or Replacement

Corrosion is one of the main causes of pipeline failure, which can have large social, economic, and environmental consequences. To mitigate this risk, pipeline operators perform regular inspections and repairs. The results of the inspections aid decision makers in determining the optimal maintenance strategy. However, there are many possible maintenance strategies, and a large degree of uncertainty, leading to difficult decision making. This paper develops a framework to inform the decision of whether it is better over the long term to continuously repair defects as they become critical or to just replace entire segments of the pipeline. The method uses a probabilistic analysis to determine the expected number of failures for each pipeline segment. The expected number of failures informs the optimal decision. The proposed framework is tailored toward mass amounts of in-line inspection data and multiple pipeline segments. A numerical example of a corroding upstream pipeline illustrates the method.