Pipeline Information Management Systems

Pipeline Information Management Systems (PIMS) are my “origin story.” These are the systems that hold pipeline digital twins. In the early 2000s, as the PHIMSA Rules were introduced, I was the software manager for Bass Trigon’s Integrity Management platform, now owned by Onebridge. It was my goal to make our integrity software more predictive. If a pipe was going to break, I wanted my system to know about it before it happened. I viewed it as weather forecasting for pipes.

In 2006 I performed a variable-sensitivity analysis on our integrity models. Unfortunately, around 99% of our time-dependent predictions depended exclusively on corrosion growth. So either we were blind to other factors, or we needed to do a better job of modeling corrosion.

To that end, better data meant better predictions. My team and I held fierce discussions on the best ways to store and represent data. I was an early participant in developing the Pipeline Open Data Standard (PODS) data model. My team and I spent many hours contemplating the role of the APDM standard in our efforts. We argued over whether we needed a data storage model of our own design. Data was everything.

After leaving Bass Trigon in 2008 (then owned by American Innovations), I poured my energy into building and deploying PIMS. At some point, I realized that as an engineer and a data scientist, I could make technical contributions beyond designing database schema. Now I am working towards near-real-time monitoring and data collecting.

This page is a repository for the articles I wrote during my PIMS phase. While these topics are still dear to my heart, they are no longer part of my current “brand.”