Programming Language for Pipeline Integrity Engineer

You can find a lot of article like What Programming Language Should I Learn First? and the first thing coming up mostly talking about the goal, whether you want to be a front end developer, back end developer, data engineer, machine learning engineer, DevOps, Sys Admin, data scientist , and other title that I am not familiar with, so if I am a pipeline integrity engineer where should I start?

What is Pipeline ?

At first I need to clarify here what I mean by pipeline as per dictionary : a long pipe, typically underground or subsea, for conveying oil, gas, etc. over long distances.

Pipeline is an expensive piece of equipment, with high consequences attach to it. If one equipment fail inside a plant, depend on its function and redundancy regime, nobody may not aware except the people who manage it. If one pipeline fail,(leak, burst, explode) it is very likely come up in news, maybe local, national or world news depend on magnitude.

Due to the consequences of failure, most pipeline operator stated No Leak Policy for all (at least most) of their pipelines, this mean do anything at all cost to prevent any failure, even tough in some cases (depend on impact) can be as low as Run to Fail Philosophy (leak and repair regime)

What Pipeline Integrity Engineer Do ?

The main objective of pipeline integrity engineer is to prevent any failure by all means. So we look at our crystal ball try to predict what can go wrong and do whatever necessary to prevent it happened.

Our Crystal Ball works mainly based on physic, scientific and engineering, mostly metallurgical — material science, corrosion, chemistry, civil-geotechnical, in some cases even deep down to biology, oceanography with supporting topography of marine discipline.

Pipeline Integrity Engineer, collect and assess all data from various findings, inspections, surveys, instrument reading and asses the current pipeline integrity and make prediction of future pipeline integrity. Then develop a strategy and plan of activities or study need to be done to ensure safe operation of our pipelines.

When I started my career in the end of 20th century, we were mostly use deterministic approach, with limited proprietary software at that time so mostly analysis done in excel. Now we have more data coming from various instrument reading, in despite of more proprietary software for pipeline integrity, I personally think we still need something beyond excel to extract, process and present our data.

This make the nearest creature to a pipeline integrity engineer is a data scientist

Based my personal experience, I would define requirement for a programming language for pipeline integrity engineer have to cover :

Data Extraction and Conversion

Data for analysis obtain from various reports, file in various formats, databases, spreadsheets, word doc, and mostly pdf. This require language that have capability to extract and wrangling various data format

Data Visualization

We are visual creature, most of analysis for data pattern, data clustering, trending can be done just by properly present it visually, at least as preliminary analysist

Statistical Capabilities

I have observed the industry have move from deterministic approach to probabilistic, therefore statistical capability is very critical

Geospatial Data Management

It is very important for any pipeline assessment to be able to corelate between any features on pipeline with its location, therefore Geospatial Data capability is very important to obtain the data, convert, assess and present geospatial data

Big Data Management

Pipeline Integrity in future will be more dealing with online streaming data form various instruments, to process and assess this data together with other data will require something more than excel

Machine Learning ?

Some people (including me) have experiment with machine learning to use all existing data to predict failure, mostly useful for unknown phenomenon or correlation.

Reporting

We are not a software developer, our process end with a report, our production flow is to produce a report as our product to provide conclusion, recommendation, or decision based on our assessment. This require programming language that can seamlessly produce a report to various form, presentation, document or even publish in web.

Python or R ?

Welcome to the battle zone, both languages meet all above requirements, however I have to apologize for my biased opinion due to RMarkdown for reporting…….

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