Fleet Management Optimization Using Advanced Analytics

Abstract Remote monitoring units (RMUs) allow pipeline operators to collect vital data about the performance of cathodic protection (CP) infrastructure and pipeline assets. Capturing this data ensures that operators can efficiently gather regulatory compliance data while increasing the visibility of CP effectiveness on their pipeline. Historic data is also used to understand trends and make predictions of the asset’s future performance. With increasing quantities of RMUs being deployed, fleet management is becoming a much more important, and sometimes daunting, task. It’s becoming difficult for a pipeline operator to review each discrete measurement, and often alarms can create fatigue, especially when set up incorrectly. In this paper we present a series of fleet management tools which enable CP operators to improve the performance of their RMUs. This includes checks for common installation issues, alarm reduction, system uptime optimization, and CP specific health metrics and forecasting. The time-consuming task of reviewing data from hundreds or thousands of RMUs is reduced to a set of actionable insights that will result in better outcomes across the entire fleet.