ANAGRAM: Using Risk-Spend Efficiency to Help Gas Utilities Reduce the Risk of Leaks and Explosions

The SIPmath Group and Lumina team developed a decision-support web application named ANAGRAM – Analytica for Natural Gas Risk Analysis and Management.  ANAGRAM is being applied to analyze and manage both transmission and distribution. ANAGRAM addresses a full range of threat types, ranging from corrosion to manufacturing defects, to third party damage (e.g., using a backhoe in the wrong place). It addresses a full range of mitigation activities, ranging from direct assessment to in-line inspection, to replacement or retirement.

For each pipe segment or other asset, it provides an estimate of the likelihood of failure from each threat type, and the consequences of failure, such as a leak or explosion. It estimates the effectiveness of each mitigation to reduce these risks. It also estimates the project cost for each type of mitigation based on asset characteristics, length, and location.  It uses this information to estimate the total reduction in risk and hence RSE for each project.

ANAGRAM is a web application providing a series of user-interface dashboards to display assets, define and analyze mitigation projects, and to compare projects and portfolios of projects using a variety of metrics including RSE. It imports standard asset data provided by the utility and generates results and reports on mitigation projects. It displays assets and pipeline routes on a map, using color to identify the characteristics of each asset, such as type, age, risk, or RSE for a selected mitigation.

ANAGRAM uses Sparse Monte Carlo, a patent-pending algorithm developed by Sam Savage. This method dramatically speeds up Monte Carlo simulation used to estimate the probability distributions of the consequences of failures. It simulates only those rare events where there is at least one failure (e.g. ignition event) and does not waste computation to simulate the samples with no failures.