Published on May 2026 | Intelligent pipeline maintenance

Advanced risk-Informed prioritization and evolutionary cost-optimal framework for intelligent corrosion maintenance in pipelines

Pipeline infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable to complex, multi-stage corrosion defects that compromise structural integrity, operational reliability, regulatory compliance, and long-term cost-effectiveness. Conventional periodic maintenance strategies often lack adaptability to real-time degradation dynamics and environmental variability, resulting in inefficient resource utilization and elevated failure risks. This paper introduces ARPC-DOX (Advanced Risk-Informed ABCDE prioritization and evolutionary cost-optimal framework for intelligent Corrosion Maintenance in Pipelines), a novel AI-driven decision-support framework that integrates predictive modeling, dynamic risk assessment, and cost-aware optimization for intelligent pipeline maintenance. ARPC-DOX fuses a cross-Bayesian network, augmented with cross-attention mechanisms, to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies in corrosion progression and detect evolving multi-stage defect patterns with high precision. The framework consolidates heterogeneous data sources including inspection logs, sensor telemetry, operational parameters, material characteristics, and environmental stressors into a unified, context-aware predictive engine. Maintenance prioritization is performed through an enhanced ABCDE framework, which is embedded with a dynamic weight adjustment layer that adaptively recalibrates risk weights based on current degradation trends and uncertainty profiles. To optimize the trade-off between maintenance cost and failure risk, the system employs the ADDAX algorithm, a robust, adaptive differential evolution-based metaheuristic designed for dynamic, high-dimensional optimization tasks. Extensive simulation studies conducted on a 100-segment synthetic pipeline network demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness in reducing failure probability, enhancing risk responsiveness, and achieving superior resource allocation. ARPC-DOX represents a scalable, intelligent, and real-time corrosion management paradigm that significantly enhances the safety, resilience, and sustainability of modern pipeline systems.