Fuzzy-based robustness assessment of buried pipelines

This paper presents a fuzzy-based robustness measure and assessment of a buried pipeline for periods of 4, 8, 12, and 16 years. The adverse effects of corrosion on the performance of a buried steel pipeline are investigated based on the failure modes: deflection, wall thrust, buckling pressure, and bending strain. Other corrosion-induced failure modes such as blowout, splitting, and joint pullout are not considered in this paper but the proposed methodology can be used to assess any type of corrosion-related failures for steel, cast iron, and ductile iron pipes. To account for the amount and the damage of infrastructure due to corrosion is strenuous because of a lack of information and imprecise information associated with the corrosion process. Therefore, corrosion is considered as a fuzzy variable in the analyses so as to account for the intuitive feature of the corrosion-induced failure modes of buried pipelines. In this study, fuzzy-based entropy robustness is used, and it refers to a dimensionless measure that takes into account the uncertainty of the failure induced on buried pipes due to imprecise corrosion and associated uncertainty in structural response. The proposed approach gains its usefulness in the assessment by examining the robustness behavior of the structure at every membership level on different levels of imprecision. The effectiveness of the fuzzy entropy- based robustness measure on a buried pipeline has been demonstrated in this study. The outcome shows that the use of alpha-level discretization in the assessment of buried steel pipe based on fuzzy set and an entropy-based robustness measure approach would yield reliable results with an enhanced understanding of the impact of uncertainties and variabilities associated with pipe failure.