Video Pipeline Monitoring Offers A Tool To Avoid Costly Losses

We’ve heard of CPM, or computational pipeline monitoring. Isn’t it time that we embrace the opportunities of VPM: video pipeline monitoring? For years, pipelines have relied on traditional equipment for monitoring; that is, basic instrumentation brought back to the control room via some networking method.

Most control rooms contain a SCADA system that provides significantly enhanced control, analysis and operational integrity by using sensor-based data and feeding it in some form to human operators. The scope of supervisory control has expanded to include computational pipeline monitoring: the ability to detect leaks in the system, as well as help plan for predictive maintenance.

Yet a report by the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that oversees pipeline operations, suggests that our conventional approach to pipeline instrumentation and control has left significant gaps that cost time, money and product. These gaps include:

• Errors due to cluttered data displays, causing operator confusion or misinformation.
• Errors due to nuisance alarms, unprioritized alarms, or flurries of alarms, leading to slow or omitted response to field conditions.
• Errors related to lack of training of controllers responsible for pipeline and SCADA system operation.
• Property damage, product loss and equipment loss due to vandalism and other trespass at pipeline facilities including compressor stations.

Improvements in various hardware and software technologies are enabling more choices in the instrumentation that can be put in the field and tied back to the control room. However, instrumentation usually just senses and delivers data; it must be converted into usable information by a trained controller or by other systems. Making better decisions faster requires more data, integrated into forms that enable faster decisions.

Video delivers ready-to-use information, in the form of still and moving pictures, to help controllers make better decisions faster. Thus, video helps address the operational gaps in efficient and cost-effective ways.

One way to train operators is to observe and critique their actions during a pipeline alarm or incident. Modern video and historian tools allow engineers and operators to “go back in time” to view what happened, and what actions the operator took at the HMI during the incident. The photo in Figure 1 shows a Wonderware ActiveFactory screen (center left), with historical data on the top and video from the plant floor on the bottom. The center right screen shows a video recording of the HMI screen, and what actions the operator took during the incident. With this information, it is possible to reconstruct exactly what happened during an incident, and what the operator did about it.

Addressing The Gaps
Pipeline operators are starting to apply video systems as part of their operating practice. Here is how video can fill the various gaps in operation: