Application of Analytical Hierarchy Process and Linear Programming to Decision and Cost Optimization for Pipeline Maintenance in Nigeria
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The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation(NNPC) lacks the ability to maintain their pipelines, which tend to fail when damage occurs causing oil spillage and sometimes fire. Consistent oil spills from these pipelines constitute health hazards to the community as well as a decrease in revenue for NNPC. As a mode of oil transportation, NNPC’s pipelines traverse the landscape of the Niger Delta region and utilize a huge amount of land whose original ecosystem has been altered. A cost effective global best practice (pipeline integrity management) is proposed that will curb the problems of pipeline failures in the oil and gas industry in Nigeria.This praxis is focused on two challenges. The first challenge is to evaluate possible decision criteria for performing pipeline integrity management in the oil and gas industry and the specific objective of this part is to identify and select a cost-effective maintenance approach that will minimize pipeline failures. The second challenge is to evaluate the optimal minimum cost associated with performing integrity management of pipelines and the objective is to determine the cost of implementing a pipeline integrity management. A cost-effective approach is selected with the use of analytical hierarchy process(AHP) for analyzing the qualitative data while the risk matrix is used for risk analysis of the maintenance techniques and linear programming is used for analyzing the quantitative data to determine the cost of implementing a pipeline integrity management. These methodologies will promote reliability and improve the integrity of the pipeline throughout its life cycle. The dataset used for the study was collected from January 2007 to December 2016 and consists of the following variables: the cost of product loss, the volume of oil spilled and different cost of maintenance techniques. The different approaches analyzed are preventive (control techniques) maintenance, corrective maintenance, and predictive (monitoring techniques) maintenance. The results from the AHP model reveals that preventive maintenance is cost-effective with minimal risk, followed by predictive and lastly, corrective for the causes of pipeline failure but a pipeline integrity management is recommended for effectively managing and maintaining the integrity of the pipelines which is the combination of preventive maintenance (control techniques) and predictive maintenance (monitoring techniques). The results from the Linear programming model reveals that the cost of implementing a pipeline integrity management is very low compared to the cost of not performing a pipeline integrity management (cost of pipeline failures to NNPC). Hence, the results of the proposed methodology for the praxis can be applied to different oil and gas companies that don’t currently practice integrity management to support their effort of having the ability to make a decision and cost optimization for pipeline maintenance that will mitigate the frequency of pipeline failures and improve the integrity of the pipelines.
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