Methods of Assessing the Factors Significance, Influencing the Engineering Network Pipelines Technical Condition

The article proposed methods and mechanisms on the basis of which the task of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of managing the maintenance of pipelines of engineering networks will be solved. For the analysis, sections of pipelines of the heat networks of the city of Voronezh were selected that have different conditions and modes of operation. Based on the statistical analysis of the data, factors affecting the operational reliability of each section of the pipelines under investigation were selected. At the first stage, the systematization and unification of the selected factors was carried out, and, in order to identify groups of pipeline sections with the most similar operational parameters, they were divided into classes. The division into classes was implemented by cluster analysis methods. At the next stage, one of the agglomerative methods of hierarchical cluster analysis was chosen, the Ward method, which allows achieving the minimum variance within a class of factors with homogeneous properties. The achieved results make it possible to determine the factors that have a significant impact on the operational reliability of pipeline sections of engineering networks, as well as to identify areas with a fairly high level of pipeline failures.