A boundary element method(BEM) is developed for optimizing the locations and impressed currents of electrodes in a cathodic protection system for a pipeline. It is usually designed on the basis of past experience with a limited number of empirical formulas. The optimization is performed by minimizing the electric power necessary to keep the potential on the metal surface below a critical value.A long underground structure is often buried in soil with non-uniform electric conductivity. In this case, direct application of conventional method for BEM analysis gives an unrealistic solution. To overcome this problem, the change of the electricconductivity is modeled with linear function.A penalty function is used as an objective function which has a penalty term taking a large value when the protection condition is not satisfied. To minimize it, the Simplex method is employed. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of the method, someexample problems are presented.
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