Deeppipe: Theory-guided prediction method based automatic machine learning for maximum pitting corrosion depth of oil and gas pipeline

Abstract

Accurate monitoring of pipeline corrosion is important and necessary not only for the normal operation of oil and gas pipelines but also for the reliable and stable supply of energy. To avoid failures of buried steel pipelines, the precise prediction of maximum pitting corrosion depth should be conducted to prevent accidents. In this paper, an automatic machine learning (AML) based approach is developed to automate the construction of corrosion depth prediction model. The engineering theory and domain knowledge are integrated into feature engineering, which is an important part of the machine learning (ML) modeling process, to overcome the drawback of the conventional modeling method of ML. Subsequently, a novel prediction method, so-called theory-guided AML (Tg-AML) is proposed for the maximum depth prediction of pitting corrosion pipeline. Firstly, several new feature variables are constructed based on the corrosion mechanism (empirical model and interaction between input variables). Then, seven different feature subsets are developed based on correlation analysis. To select the suitable feature subset and verify the superiority of Tg-AML, a real-world pitting corrosion dataset is utilized for performance comparison based on evaluation metrics. After acquiring the suitable feature subset, the maximum pitting corrosion depth prediction model that fits the data and is guided by both engineering theory and domain knowledge is established. The results indicate that the proposed model achieves better accuracy and efficiency than other models, such as neural network, and decision tree, with root mean square error (RMSE) being 0.288, mean absolute error (MAE) being 0.174, confidence index (Cl) being 0.933.