Artificial Neural Network Surrogate Modeling of Oil Reservoir: a Case Study
This provides a more efficient alternative to conventional reservoir modeling for petroleum engineers, though it appears incremental as it applies existing neural network methods to this domain.
The researchers tackled the problem of computationally expensive oil reservoir simulation by developing an artificial neural network surrogate model that replicates conventional reservoir modeling outputs with very high accuracy while demonstrating much higher computational performance.
We develop a data-driven model, introducing recent advances in machine learning to reservoir simulation. We use a conventional reservoir modeling tool to generate training set and a special ensemble of artificial neural networks (ANNs) to build a predictive model. The ANN-based model allows to reproduce the time dependence of fluids and pressure distribution within the computational cells of the reservoir model. We compare the performance of the ANN-based model with conventional reservoir modeling and illustrate that ANN-based model (1) is able to capture all the output parameters of the conventional model with very high accuracy and (2) demonstrate much higher computational performance. We finally elaborate on further options for research and developments within the area of reservoir modeling.