Long-term prediction on atmospheric corrosion data series of carbon steel in China based on NGBM(1,1) model and genetic algorithm

Purpose: This study aims to achieve long-term prediction on a specific monotonic data series of atmospheric corrosion rate vs time. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents a new method, used to the collected corrosion data of carbon steel provided by the China Gateway to Corrosion and Protection, that combines non-linear gray Bernoulli model (NGBM(1,1) with genetic algorithm to attain the purpose of this study. Findings: Results of the experiments showed that the present study’s method is more accurate than other algorithms. In particular, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and the root mean square error (RMSE) of the proposed method in data sets are 9.15 per cent and 1.23 µm/a, respectively. Furthermore, this study illustrates that model parameter can be used to evaluate the similarity of curve tendency between two carbon steel data sets. Originality/value: Corrosion data are part of a typical small-sample data set, and these also belong to a gray system because corrosion has a clear outcome and an uncertainly occurrence mechanism. In this work, a new gray forecast model was proposed to achieve the goal of long-term prediction of carbon steel in China.