Recently, in proportion to increased demand on environmentally-friendly heat source, efficient management of district heating(DH) system becomes one of important issue. The objectives of this paper are to systematize data processing of transition temperature, investigate the effect of temperature variations on thermal fatigue and find out a way to improve design features of Korean DH pipes. For this purpose, reliable fatigue life evaluation procedures are examined and applied to quantify thermal fatigue lives. Also, as a prototypal optimization analysis results, mean value of original cross sectional area of selected pipes was reduced 18.6% sustaining their sufficient margins against fatigue failure. So, it is anticipated that the output of this research can be used as useful information of optimal design and operation in the future.