Intelligent diagnosis of natural gas pipeline defects using improved flower pollination algorithm and artificial neural network

Abstract With the increasing service life of pipelines, natural gas pipelines can gradually age and produce various corrosion defects. Hence, in order to ensure the efficiency and safety of pipeline transportation in the peak period of natural gas consumption, the intelligent diagnosis technology of the pipelines is of vital importance. In this paper, iterative chaotic map with infinite collapses (ICMIC) and comprehensive opposition (CO) learning strategy are used to optimize flower pollination algorithm (FPA) to enhance search abilities of original FPA algorithm. Among them, the ICMIC enhances the diversity of population, and the local CO learning strategy enhances its exploitation ability. Fifteen classical benchmark functions are used to test the optimization performance of the improved flower pollination algorithm (IFPA). Considering the category, complexity and application of test functions, a more reasonable evaluation formula is proposed. The test shows that the performance of IFPA algorithm is obviously better than other classical intelligent algorithms. Based on the excellent performance of IFPA, the IFPA algorithm is used to optimize the initial weights and thresholds of back propagation (BP) neural network. Therefore, a comprehensive IFPA-BP network model is constructed for the intelligent diagnosis of natural gas pipeline defects. The results show that the proposed model can effectively overcome the problem that BP neural network is prone to fall into local optimal value, and it can accurately identify the pipelines defects. This will facilitate intelligent diagnosis of natural gas pipelines defects.