Performance evaluation of different short path algorithms to improve oil-gas pipelines

Abstract

The oil-gas pipeline is a complicated and expensive system in terms of construction, control, materials, monitoring, and maintenance which includes economic, social and environmental hazards. As a case study of Iraq, the system of pipelines is above the ground and is liable to disasters that may produce an environmental tragedy as well as the loss of life and money. Hence, this article presents a performance evaluation of different short path algorithms to improve oil-gas pipelines. The chosen algorithms in this paper were Parallel Short Path Algorithm (PSPA), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm and Genetic Algorithm (GA). The main performance metric is the cost of the pipelines. Simulation trials were performed using the MATLAB program for the chosen algorithms. The performance comparison showed that the lowest cost of laying oil and gas pipelines was by applying the GA algorithm when the number of wells was set to 50-600. Conversely, the PSPA algorithm showed the best performance in terms of required implementation time for all scenarios. Besides, PSPA appeared to have acceptable performance in terms of the cost of the pipeline when the number of wells was arranged between50-600. Furthermore, PSPA showed the best performance for 700 and 840 wells in terms of the cost of laying the oil and gas pipelines compared to ACO and GA. It should be noted that the ACO algorithm showed medium performance in terms of the cost of laying oil and gas pipelines compared to PSPA and GA.