Traditional reliability theory cannot objectively describe the multi-state of the pipeline system with reliability analysis. In addition, studies on reliability modeling of the multi-state pipeline system assume that the states of each pipeline unit are independent. In this work, an efficient method was proposed to identify the performance relationship. Specifically, a model of a multi-state reconstruction system containing the decaying process and the repairing process was established. Also, a multi-state reliability modeling method was developed based on the performance degradation process of the pipeline system considering the failure interaction. Further, the Markov model of the degradation process was built to determine the relationship between the occurrence probability of each state and the decay path. The cloud generalization function was established using cloud inference combined with the general generation function. The pipeline system can be dynamically divided by the analytic hierarchy process according to different factors affecting the degradation of pipeline performance. A numerical example was used to demonstrate the efficiency and applicability of the proposed method by comparing it with existing methods. The proposed approaches are found to be sufficient to improve risk decision and reliability analysis of the pipeline system, which better supports the reliability-informed integrity management for the whole system. (C) 2020 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.