Applications of fuzzy decision-making in pipeline leak localization

Monitoring oil transporting pipelines is an important task for economical and safe operation, loss prevention, and environmental protection from crude oil emission. The leak detection of oil pipelines, therefore, plays a key role in the overall integrity, monitoring a pipeline system. This paper proposes a fuzzy decision-making approach to oil pipeline leak localization. The two main methods, pressure gradient localization and negative pressure wave localization, are combined with fuzzy logical decision-making to form a novel fault diagnosis scheme. The combination scheme can improve the precision of localization. An application example, a 14 km long oil pipeline leak detection and localization is illustrated, and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated using the practical results.