Pipeline Pig & Inline Inspection Tracking

Comparison reflects typical conventional tracking practice; on some runs both methods are used together for redundancy.

Pig tracking is a specialized service around inline inspection campaigns, not a permanent monitoring product — the same fiber route can, however, later carry continuous DAS monitoring.

• Good fit: long-haul pipeline cleaning runs, ILI tool runs (geometry, MFL, caliper), commissioning pigging, and any run where a stuck pig would be costly to locate by hand.
• Good fit: pipelines that already have a fiber optic cable along the route — no pipeline modification or in-line equipment is required.
• Boundary: tracking quality depends on a continuous cabled route; ungasketed sections beyond the fiber end, or lines with no co-located cable, are outside coverage.
• Not a fit: pipelines with no fiber route, and inspection data analysis of the ILI tool itself — tracking reports where the tool is, not what it records.

Operationally, a tracking engagement is planned around the pigging schedule rather than around the monitoring system: the fiber check and setup happen before launch, the tracking desk runs for the duration of the passage, and the run closes with a trajectory report that files into the inspection-campaign record. Because runs are discrete events, several runs on different lines can be supported from the same equipment set over a campaign — which is how operators with long multi-line networks typically schedule the service, line by line, alongside their ILI vendor's calendar. The accumulated record now stands at more than 3000 km of tracked runs across cleaning, utility and inline inspection campaigns.

A moving pig displaces product, contacts the pipe wall and generates a distinctive acoustic and vibration signature that propagates into the soil and reaches the co-located fiber optic cable. The distributed sensing system detects this signature at successive positions along the route, so the pig's passage is registered continuously rather than at isolated receiver stations. From these detections the system reconstructs the run: distance traveled, current position, average and instantaneous speed, and — critically — the moment and location if movement stops.

• Cleaning pigs: position and speed reported from launch to arrival, so the run stays visible end to end.
• Inline inspection tools: high-value ILI tools are tracked with the same continuous coverage, protecting the investment in the inspection campaign.
• Stuck-pig localization: when progress stops, the stopping point is identified directly — the intervention crew is dispatched to a position, not to a search area.
• Run context: passage events are logged with time and distance, building the trajectory record handed over in the run report.

Because the sensing line is the existing external cable, nothing changes inside the pipeline: no transmitters fitted to the pig train, no launch or receiver modifications, and no tool-loss risk added by tracking equipment itself.