In our CI setup, duplicate pipelines are started when pushing to a branch that is attached to an open Merge Request.
For example:
This happens because when a MR is created, a new commit to the attached branch triggers one pipeline for the open MR and one for the branch itself.
The CERN GitLab team suggested me to take a look at those pages:
In this MR, I will try to configure our CI to avoid duplicate pipelines.