A hybrid machine learning model for landslide-oriented risk assessment of long-distance pipelines

Preparation of pipeline risk zoning is essential for pipeline construction and safe operation. Landslides are one of the main sources of risk to the safe operations of oil and gas pipelines in mountainous areas. This work aims to propose a quantitative assessment model of landslide-induced long-distance pipeline risk by analyzing historical landslide hazard data along oil and gas pipelines. Using the Changshou-Fuling-Wulong-Nanchuan (CN) gas pipeline dataset, two independent assessments were carried out: landslide susceptibility assessment and pipeline vulnerability assessment. Firstly, the study combined the recursive feature elimination and particle swarm optimization-AdaBoost method (RFE-PSO-AdaBoost) to develop a landslide susceptibility mapping model. The RFE method was used to select the conditioning factors, while PSO was used to tune the hyper-parameters. Secondly, considering the angular relationship between the pipelines and landslides, and the segmentation of the pipelines using the fuzzy clustering (FC), the CRITIC method (FC-CRITIC) was combined to develop a pipeline vulnerability assessment model. Accordingly, a pipeline risk map was obtained based on pipeline vulnerability and landslide susceptibility assessment. The study results show that almost 35.3% of the slope units were in extremely high susceptibility zones, 6.68% of the pipelines were in extremely high vulnerability areas, the southern and eastern pipelines segmented in the study area were located in high risk areas and coincided well with the distribution of landslides. The proposed hybrid machine learning model for landslide-oriented risk assessment of long-distance pipelines can provide a scientific and reasonable risk classification for new planning or in service pipelines to avoid landslide-oriented risk and ensure their safe operation in mountainous areas.