Optimized maintenance plan for oil and gas pipelines

Abstract

Oil and gas pipelines transport millions of dollars of products every day making the optimization of their long-term maintenance strategies an essential target for practitioners. Thus, this paper aims to optimize the maintenance plan of such pipelines by maximizing their lifetime average condition with the minimum possible cost. This is achieved in three steps: (1) developing a life-cycle cost model for such pipelines to determine their net present value (NPV) based on the different rehabilitation actions applied throughout their lifetime; (2) establishing a strategy to determine the condition index of such pipelines before and after any rehabilitation action applied throughout their lifetime; and (3) formulating the optimization model and applying the elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to determine the optimum maintenance plans for such pipelines. The optimization model is applied to a real-life case study to demonstrate its applicability.