Reliability-based preventive maintenance planning for corroded pipelines using a RBF surrogate model

This paper discusses an alternative approach in reliability-based preventive maintenance (RBPM) planning for corroded pipelines. The RBPM strategy can be understood as keeping the pipeline’s reliability always higher than a predefined safety level. In the literature, the burst pressure of pipes, which is essential for failure probability calculation, is usually obtained with analytical equations based on experimental results. Recent research indicates that this type of analysis usually leads to overly conservative and uneconomical results. This work shows a different way of calculating the burst pressure in the context of maintenance planning: with surrogates based on finite element modeling, using radial basis functions (RBFs). Essentially, finite element analysis is performed on a set of points sampled from the design space of the problem, and the results are used to build a surrogate model, using RBF. This surrogate model is used to evaluate the burst pressure during reliability analysis. The results indicate that the proposed approach can predict fewer and delayed preventive maintenances; the proposed methodology can lead to less conservative, more realistic, and more economical maintenance schedules.