Copyright © 2011 Alex W. Dawotola et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

A model is constructed for risk management of crude pipeline subject to rupture on the basis of a methodology that incorporates structured expert judgment and analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The risk model calculates frequency of failure and their probable consequences for different segments of crude pipeline, considering various failure mechanisms. Specifically, structured expert judgment is used to provide frequency of failure assessments for identified failure mechanisms of the pipeline. In addition, AHP approach is utilized to obtain relative failure likelihood for attributes of failure mechanisms with very low probability of occurrence. Finally, the expected cost of failure for a given pipeline segment is estimated by combining its frequency of failure and the consequences of failure, estimated in terms of historical costs of failure from the pipeline operator’s database. A real-world case study of a crude pipeline is used to demonstrate the application of the proposed methodology.