Real-Time Reliability Assessment and Management of Marine Pipelines

In-line instrumentation information processing procedures have been developed and implemented to permit ‘real-time’ assessment of the reliability characteristics of marine pipelines. The objective of this work is to provide pipeline engineers, owners and operators with additional useful information that can help determine what should be done to help maintain pipelines. This paper describes the real-time RAM (reliability assessment and management) procedures that have been developed and verified with results from laboratory and field tests to determine the burst pressures of pipelines. These procedures address the detection and accuracy characteristics of results from in-line or ‘smart pig’ instrumentation, evaluation of the implications of non-detection, and the accuracy of alternative methods that can be used to evaluate the burst pressures of corroded and dented – gouged pipelines. In addition, processes are described have been developed to permit use of the information accumulated from in-line instrumentation (pipeline integrity information databases) to make evaluations of the burst pressure characteristics of pipelines that have not or can not be instrumented. Both of these processes are illustrated with applications to two example pipelines; one for which in-line instrumentation results are available and one for which such information is not available.