Pipeline routing being one of the crucial activities of pipeline design, significantly affects almost every other aspect of the design process. Seabed terrain at many locations in Arabian Peninsula and other parts of the world is revealed to be rough & undulating which sometimes presents a significant challenge in routing the pipeline. The common challenges for pipeline routing on the rough seabed terrain can be identified and evaluated using the advanced tools at early stage of the design to select an optimized route. Figure 1 depicts the examples of pipeline routing on the rough seabed. Intent of presenting this paper is to showcase the design process followed to identify the key challenges involved in the routing of offshore pipeline on a rough & undulating seabed terrain and the methodology adopted to successfully overcome / mitigate them while achieving an optimized result in terms of most techno-economically feasible route. In addition, new technique based on least geocost path is briefly touched upon for its future application.
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