Adaptive Multilayered Particle Swarm Optimized Neural Network (AMPSONN) for Pipeline Corrosion Prediction

Artificial Neural Network (ANN) design has long been a complex problem because its performance depends heavily on the network topology and algorithm to train the set of synaptic weights. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) has been the favored optimization algorithm to complement ANN, but a thorough literature study has shown that there are gaps with current approaches which integrate PSO with ANN, including the optimization of network topology and the unreliable weight training process. These gaps have caused inferior effect on critical Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications and systems, particularly when predicting plant machinery and piping failure due to corrosion. The problem of corrosion prediction in the oil and gas domain remains unanswered due to the lack of a flexible prediction method which targets specific damage mechanisms that caused corrosion. This paper proposes a hybrid prediction method known as the Adaptive Multilayered Particle Swarm Optimized Neural Network (AMPSONN), which integrates several layers of PSO to optimize different parameters of the ANN. The multilayered PSO enables the method to optimize the network topology and train the set of synaptic weights at the same time using a hierarchical optimization approach. Through detailed discussion and literature study, the damage mechanism focused in this research is the CO2 corrosion and the dataset for this research is obtained from the NORSOK empirical model. The proposed AMPSONN method is tested against BP, MPSO and PSOBP methods on an industrial corrosion dataset for different test conditions. The results showed that AMPSONN performs best on all three problems, exhibiting high classification accuracies and time efficiency. Keywords—Corrosion; damage mechanism; prediction method; artificial neural network; particle swarm optimization