Failure probability estimation of long pipeline

It is well known that, for the majority of pressurized pipelines, both the load and the resistance parameters show evident uncertainty, and a probabilistic approach should be applied to assess their behaviors. Concerning reliability estimation of passive components such as pressure vessel and pipeline, there are two kinds of approaches – direct estimation using statistics of historical failure event data, and indirect estimation using probabilistic analysis of the failure phenomena of consideration. The direct estimation method can be validated relatively easily. However, it suffers statistical uncertainty due to scarce data. Indirect estimation method relies on the statistics of material property and those of environment load which are more readily available. As to systems composed of passive components, statistical dependence among component failures is a complex issue that cannot be ignored in reliability estimation