Semi-supervised learning framework for oil and gas pipeline failure detection.

Journal: Scientific reports
Published Date:

Abstract

Quantifying failure events of oil and gas pipelines in real- or near-real-time facilitates a faster and more appropriate response plan. Developing a data-driven pipeline failure assessment model, however, faces a major challenge; failure history, in the form of incident reports, suffers from limited and missing information, making it difficult to incorporate a persistent input configuration to a supervised machine learning model. The literature falls short on the development of appropriate solutions to utilize incomplete databases and incident reports in the pipeline failure problem. This work proposes a semi-supervised machine learning framework which mines existing oil and gas pipeline failure databases. The proposed cluster-impute-classify (CIC) approach maps a relevant subset of the failure databases through which missing information in the incident report is reconstructed. A classifier is then trained on the fly to learn the functional relationship between the descriptors from a diverse feature set. The proposed approach, presented within an ensemble learning architecture, is easily scalable to various pipeline failure databases. The results show up to 91% detection accuracy and stable generalization ability against increased rate of missing information.

Authors

  • Mohammad H Alobaidi
    Department of Civil Engineering, McGill University, 817 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal, QC, H3A 0C3, Canada. mohammad.alobaidi@mail.mcgill.ca.
  • Mohamed A Meguid
    Department of Civil Engineering, McGill University, 817 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal, QC, H3A 0C3, Canada.
  • Tarek Zayed
    Department of Building and Real Estate (BRE), Faculty of Construction and Environment (FCE), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Electronic address: tarek.zayed@polyu.edu.hk.