Abstract
Offshore lifelines, such as gas pipelines and cables, consist large-scale and very important engineering projects, while their safe operation is undoubtedly a challenging task. Offshore lifelines usually cross submarine areas facing various offshore geohazards, which are very often related (directly or indirectly) with local seismicity. Therefore, in order to avoid severe damages with devastating consequences, it is of paramount importance to optimize their design, taking realistically into account all earthquake-related geohazards and their detrimental effects on the examined lifeline. Since the avoidance of all geohazardous areas is not always feasible, the route optimization of a lifeline at an early stage of the design phase is very crucial for its safety and serviceability. The current study presents a new smart decision-support tool that aims to facilitate route optimization of offshore lifelines through: (a) the qualitative and quantitative assessment of the major earthquake-related geohazards along a possible lifeline routing, (b) the quantitative assessment of their potential impact on the lifeline, and (c) the selection of the optimum lifeline route. The proposed decision-support tool can be very useful for the efficient design of an offshore lifeline, provided that adequate and reliable input data are available. Its efficiency is illustrated with two characteristic case studies in the Mediterranean Sea.
Highlights
During the last decades, many offshore lifelines have been constructed worldwide, and many more will be developed in the near future
Geographic Information System (GIS) is an effective, fast and continuously improving tool for route selection compared to empirical methods (Balogun et al, 2013)
The case of offshore oil pipeline routing in Malaysia accounting of environmental, engineering and financial criteria has been examined by Balogun et al (2015, 2017)
Summary
Many offshore lifelines have been constructed worldwide, and many more will be developed in the near future. In the second case study the upgraded version of the tool has been applied, which is capable of performing a quantitative assessment of the examined geohazard (i.e., kinematic distress due to seismic faults via geotechnical-type simulations) Another major difference between the two case studies is related to the additional design criteria, apart from the length minimization of the proposed route. In this case the pipeline length is very long, while the pipeline has to be placed in greater depths (of the order of 4,000 m) and difficult seabed conditions (narrow valleys, etc.) that exist between the nearby Greek islands, leading to an extremely high construction cost. All authors analyzed and interpreted the results and contributed to the completion of the manuscript
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