Abstract— Notwithstanding that the transport of natural gas by pipeline system represents the safest way for the on land gas transfer, the failure in pipelines can happen and thus cause massive human, ecological, material, and social damages. Being long linear systems, sometimes comprising thousands of kilometers of pipes, various factors can inflict damages in pipelines. Identification of these factors and reliable risk assessment are among the key elements for preventing the damages. Accordingly, integration of highly developed information and communications technology systems represents a necessary paradigm for the successful planning, monitoring, and controlling of this infrastructure system. The main goal of this paper is to propose a model based on type-2 fuzzy sets to assess the impacts of these systems on the environment using modern technologies: Geographic Information System (GIS) and Information Building Modeling (BIM). In this way, the proposed model enables more adequate risk assessment because of the capacity of interval type-2 fuzzy sets to convey higher degrees of uncertainty along with fuzzy inference system potentiality to incorporate expert judgments, experience, and engineering knowledge thus providing more accurate and robust results. On the other hand, application of BIM and GIS technology can enable optimal planning, installation, monitoring, and maintenance of the natural gas pipeline systems together with the identification of various types of factors that cause their damages. Also, these advanced technologies allow complex analysis and 3D visualization of the impacts of a large number of different factors and parameters for all the pipeline life cycle phases. Guidelines for the future development of this model are also given.
 

Index Terms—Natural gas pipeline system (GPLS), Geographic Information System (GIS), Building Information Modeling (BIM), Environmental impact, Risk assessment, Type-2 Fuzzy sets

Cite: Kosa Golić, "A Fuzzy Model for Assessing Impacts of Natural Gas Pipeline Systems on Environment," Journal of Advanced Management Science, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 47-53, June 2019. doi: 10.18178/joams.7.2.47-53