Quick Reconstruction of Arbitrary Pipeline Defect Profiles From MFL Measurements Employing Modified Harmony Search Algorithm

Abstract

This paper proposes a quick and accurate method for reconstructing defect profiles in pipelines from magnetic flux leakage (MFL) signals employing a modified harmony search (MHS) algorithm. To improve the quality of the initial harmony memory, a multiple selection opposition-based learning strategy is presented in the MHS algorithm. Moreover, the pitch adjusting rate is set to increase linearly, and the distance bandwidth ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">bw</i> ) is designed to be dynamically adjusted to shorten the calculation time. A specially designed modified sum-squared error with weights is proposed and employed as the fitness function to improve the fitting degree between the reference and predicted signals in the defect response segment. The weights are determined by the characteristics of reference signals. We demonstrate the adequacy of the performance of the proposed model using both simulated and real MFL signals. We also present comparative results of the proposed model and other methods. The results prove that the proposed method can achieve higher efficiency while maintaining excellent accuracy.