Comparative Analysis of Neural Network Models for Petroleum Products Pipeline Monitoring

Abstract

In recent years, Neural Network (NN) has gained popularity in proffering solution to complex nonlinear problems. Monitoring of variations in Petroleum Products Pipeline (PPP) attributes (flow rate, pressure, temperature, viscosity, density, inlet and outlet volume) which changes with time is complex due to existence of non linear interaction amongst the attributes. The existing works on PPP monitoring are limited by lack of capabilities for pattern recognition and learning from previous data. In this paper, NN models with pattern recognition and learning capabilities are compared with a view of selecting the best model for monitoring PPP. Data was collected from Pipelines and Products Marketing Company (PPMC), Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The data was used for NN training, validation and testing with different NN models such as Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Radial Basis Function (RBF), Generalized Feed Forward (GFF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Time Delay Network (TDN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Neuro Solutions 6.0 was used as the front-end-engine for NN training, validation and testing while My Structured Query Language (MySQL) database served as the back-end-engine. Performance of NN models was measured using Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Correlation Coefficient (r), Akaike Information Criteria (AIC) and Minimum Descriptive Length (MDL). MLP with one hidden layer and three processing elements performed better than other NN models in terms of MSE, MAE, AIC, MDL and r values between the computed and the desired output.