Blog

Irth User Summit 2025 Recap - Asset Integrity

Written by Sheri Baucom | Oct 27, 2025

 

This year’s User Summit featured major AIP product advancements and new ways to visualize integrity data across corrosion, risk, geohazards, and advanced crack analysis. Clients also showcased how they’re driving measurable results—like automating ILI ingestion, adopting historical growth trend models, and applying probabilistic risk frameworks to improve decision-making and efficiency.

 

AIP Product Updates & Roadmap

  • Takeaway: Short-term (H1 2026) roadmap items were discussed, along with long-term AIP enhancements, including integrations with the damage prevention and land management platforms and introduction of generative AI.  
  • Call-to-Action for AIP Clients: Rank your priorities for H1 2026 roadmap items, as well as indicate your interest in joining an AIP User Group on the Post-User Summit survey (emailed on 10/28/25.)  Leverage the PHMSA F&G reports for Liquid and Gas, along with their supporting documentation in Freshdesk Knowledge Base. 

Dig Sheet Summary Report Updates - Client Presentation, Energy Transfer

  • Takeaway: Various enhancements were recently completed to the Dig Sheet Summary Report that significantly benefit Energy Transfer, specifically field users of the report, resulting in time savings for both field crews and engineers, improved consistency across digs, and enhanced collaboration.  
  • Call-to-Action for AIP Clients: Use the new Dig Sheet Summary Report and let us know your feedback. 

Automating ILI Ingestion with the Vendor Portal - Client Presentation, Enbridge   

  • TakeawayEnbridge is now in its 3rd year of utilizing the vendor portal to QA/QC its inline inspections, which continues to deliver efficiency, i.e., increased on-time delivery and a dramatic reduction in contract supporting services (over $700k). Enbridge has also updated its UFL (Universal Pipeline Listing) to version 5, and they would bhappy to send it to any AIP user.

External Corrosion Product Presentation & Roadmap

  • Takeaway: The external corrosion module has made significant advancements since last year’s user group and now includes functionality for close interval surveys and CP annual surveys, complete with test station management, CIS-to-CIS alignment, and integrity compliance conditions for both survey types. The possibility of developing a hardware component was also discussed 👀 
  • Call to Action: Talk to your corrosion department about managing your CIS and CP data in AIP. Does the benefit of having your corrosion and ILI data in one place outweigh the cost of moving to a new platform? Let us know!  

How a Pipeline Operator Applies Probabilistic Risk Results to Make Integrity Decisions - Client Presentation, FHR

  • Takeaway: FHR provided a high-level overview of how they apply the Reliability-Based Design & Assessment (RBDA) framework, combining structural reliability and historical-based models to calculate the probability of failure by threat and compare each mile against derived reliability targets based on top-operator historical performance (aligned with CSA Z662 Annex O). This framework that guides the development of the Risk Management module.  

Risk Management: Actionable PoF Updates

  • Takeaway: The Risk Management module for AIP calculates the probability of failure (PoF) for each of the 9 threats and allows the user to compare that to reliability thresholds, which can then support anomaly repair decisions in Integrity Compliance (to be available in the next release, AIP 3.48). The calculation of the consequence of failure (CoF) is currently underway. 
  • Call to Action for AIP Clients: The risk management module is being designed for integrity engineers to drive integrity-management decisions, and the topic of calculating probability, used in the context of POF and POE (probability of exceedance) at the anomaly level, was discussed at length. Please indicate your interest in this functionality in the post-User Summit survey.  

Integrated Data View Report

  • Takeaway: A new (FREE) report is available now for all clients that provides a single, scalable visualization consolidating multiple integrity datasets and allows users to jump from system-level to anomaly-level with clearer, faster charts. Significant usability/performance upgrades have been completed, and the roadmap includes map integration, more public/POD layers, and embedded analytics. 
  • Call to Action for AIP clients: You can access this report NOW by searching for it on the Reports page. Please review the report and provide feedback.

State of Integrity

  • Takeaway: The State of Integrity project is an analysis of the aggregated data that’s in AIP to glean insights that are useful to both our clients and the industry at large. Insights presented this year include ILI company & technology, factors impacting ILI system performance, and, of course, ILI company performance, i.e., who was the highest performing vendor according to our data set. (spicy!)
  • Call to Action for AIP clients: Gleaning information from data housed in AIP has significant potential not only to help improve our clients' integrity programs but also to elevate the industry. But we need your help to come up with the next set of interesting questions to explore! User group participants will gain access to the aggregated dataset and assist in identifying how we can provide it to our clients in a manner that is both helpful and ensures data privacy. Please see the post-User Summit survey to join the SOI User group. 

Applying API 1163 ILI Validation - Customer Panel Discussion, Energy Transfer, FHR, Southern Company

  • Takeaway: Although all 3 companies require API 1163 analyses, each company conducts the analyses and applies the results slightly differently. FHR, for example, leverages historical data within AIP to conduct a Level 2 or Level 3 analysis upfront — i.e., before anomalies are identified for repair — and applies the results probabilistically rather than deterministically. Lee highlighted the importance of organizing the anomalies correctly to ensure more accurate results for both a Level 2 and a Level 3 analysis. (And a special thanks to Michael for volunteering to be our 3rd panelist during the session and acting as co-moderator – you rock!)
  • Call to Action for the Irth team: Copious notes were taken on your feedback provided both during the panel and training session regarding the complexity of 1163 analyses and workflow/reporting enhancements, including looking at unclustered vs. clustered data, user-defined subclasses, and potentially moving away from Power BI for reporting. Stay tuned as we continue to evolve this product!

Geohazards Management Updates & Roadmap

  • Takeaway: Work is underway to build out a Geohazards Management module. The first phase of work involves integrating the data sets currently imported into the Utilisphere (damage prevention) platform, such as seismicity and soil data, in addition to uploading and reporting on bending strain results, as well as allowing ROW (right-of-way) inspections to be uploaded into AIP – Assessment Planning, per client request.
  • Call to Action for AIP Clients: Automated bending strain analysis continues to be high on clients’ request list, and there was discussion around whether Finite Element Modeling could be utilized to calculate bending strain, but also how operators are validating bending strain analysis results. We are seeking input on these questions. If you are interested in directing the development of this module, please indicate your interest on the post-User Summit survey.

Beyond Pit-to-Pit: Validating Historical Growth Trend (CGR) – Client Presentation

  • Takeaway: Brandon Charrier with Irth introduced the session by discussing the evolution of corrosion growth rates in AIP, which are constantly evolving with client needs, citing that although the historical growth trend (HGT) came out in 2021, 85% of analyses utilized pit-to-pit minimum and only 5% used HGT. The client has recently conducted an extensive study showing that pit-to-pit CGR can suffer from significant inaccuracies, which can be overcome by using HGT. “The Historical Growth Trend model outperformed both the Pit-to-Pit Min and the ILI vendor callbox matching when used to predict the most recent ILI [depth] results.” HGT is being used instead of pit-to-pit on analyses going forward.
  • Call to Action for AIP Clients: The analysis results in this study were quite compelling, and we encourage our clients to consider using HGT versus pit-to-pit CGR, based on these results. We’re curious to see what you find.

Data Science Projects

  • Takeaway: The probabilistic corrosion growth prediction model was discussed in terms of its accuracy and balance between risk and conservative future depth predictions. This model is based on PRCI research, but unlike that model, it does not rely on Monte Carlo simulations. The discussion on accurately imputing missing data with machine learning included a recent project for a pipeline operator, demonstrating how ML excels at pattern recognition.
  • Call to Action for AIP Clients: Is there an appetite for implementing the probabilistic corrosion growth depth model into AIP? Please see the post-User Summit survey. Do you have a data validation / missing data project that you’d like our data science team to work on? Contact Michael.
  • The PTC papers mentioned in this presentation that discuss corrosion growth rates can be downloaded here.

Advanced Crack Updates & Training

  • Takeaway: Current capabilities of the advanced crack module include a Pressure Cycle Fatigue Analysis using MAT-8 as well as failure assessment diagrams (FADs). 
  • Call to Action for Irth: Attendees expressed interest in utilizing the advanced crack capability within AIP if the underlying CorLas calculations were implemented into the platform. We are actively investigating whether these calculations exist in the public domain. Stay tuned!

API 1163 Updates & Training

  • Takeaway: There were several “edge” cases that the original API 1163 analysis engine was not designed for, which we have since discovered and fixed thanks to your feedback.