Preventive leak detection for high pressure gas transmission networks

Abstract

Recent developments in SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems for physical infrastructure, such as high pressure gas pipeline systems and electric grids, have generated enormous amounts of time series data. This data brings great opportunities for advanced knowledge discovery and data mining methods to identify system failures faster and earlier than operation experts. This paper presents our effort in collaboration with a utility company to solve a grand challenge; namely, to use advanced data mining methods to detect leaks on a high pressure gas transmission system. Leak detection models with unsupervised learning tasks were developed analyzing billions of data records to identify leaks of different sizes and impacts, with very low false positive rates. In particular, our solution was able to identify small leaks leading to rupture events. The model also identified small leaks not identifiable with current detection systems. Such high-fidelity early identification enables operation personnel to take preventive measures against possible catastrophic events. We then formulate several generic detection methods with models derived from time series anomaly detection methods. We show that our leak detection models are superior to the SCADA alarm system, a mass balance model and other generic time series anomaly detection models in terms of both detection accuracy and computation time.