One of the pillars of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is to let machines make decisions on behalf of humans; this paper describes new technology that allows machines to decide inspection programs and field validation and testing of results. The technology described is a part of integrity management, and uses data, statistics and expert decisions to design inspection programs. These inspection programs are an important part of the safeguarding of equipment to maintain production and safety.
This technology is a data-driven predictive model of material loss from corrosion, based on domain expert input and historical data in the form of non-destructive testing (NDT) tests. The technology trends is based on historical data and SME input, while accounting for uncertainties in NDT measurements, with uncertainties in historical trends and uncertainties in future trends. This produces a more realistic failure prediction to enhance existing RBIs and adds safety by improving on early detection of trends in data. In total, this enables the machine to update inspection plans autonomously, reducing the number of inspections significantly.
The paper also describes how the technology can be developed further to use production data and integrity operating windows to improve predictions, deal with localised corrosion and assess if the test points on a corrosion circuit are sufficient, can be reduced in number or should be manually evaluated by adding more test points.