Machine-Learning-Based Classification for Pipeline Corrosion with Monte Carlo Probabilistic Analysis

Pipeline corrosion is one of the leading causes of failures in the transmission of gas and hazardous liquids in the oil and gas industry. In-line inspection is a non-destructive inspection for detecting corrosion defects in pipelines. Defects are measured in terms of their width, length and depth. Consecutive in-line inspection data are used to determine the pipeline's corrosion growth rate and its remnant life, which set the operational and maintenance activities of the pipeline. The traditional approach of manually processing in-line inspection data has various weaknesses, including being time consuming due to huge data volume and complexity, prone to error, subject to biased judgement by experts and challenging for matching of in-line inspection datasets. This paper aimed to contribute to the adoption of machine learning approaches in classifying pipeline defects as per Pipeline Operator Forum requirements and matching in-line inspection data for determining the corrosion growth rate and remnant life of pipelines. Machine learning techniques, namely, decision tree, random forest, support vector machines and logistic regression, were applied in the classification of pipeline defects using Phyton programming. The performance of each technique in terms of the accuracy of results was compared. The results showed that the decision tree classifier model was the most accurate (99.9%) compared with the other classifiers.