Decision-Driven Geosteering Under Uncertainty: A Unified Framework for Sequential Decision Optimization
For geosteering practitioners, this provides a unified, uncertainty-aware framework that improves well placement and operational smoothness compared to traditional methods.
This work presents an uncertainty-aware geosteering framework integrating particle filtering for probabilistic subsurface interpretation with reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making. The framework evaluates three decision policies (ADP, Deep Q-learning, Dual DRL) under identical uncertainty representations, showing that belief-informed control outperforms deterministic trajectory correction in realistic simulations.
Geosteering requires navigating a well trajectory through an unknown geological configuration, while sequentially updating decisions based on indirect measurements acquired during drilling. This work presents an uncertainty-aware geosteering framework that tightly integrates particle filtering for probabilistic subsurface interpretation with value-based reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making. Geological uncertainty ahead of the drill bit is represented explicitly through a particle filter (PF), enabling belief-informed control rather than deterministic trajectory correction. The framework couples PF belief updates with belief-informed decision policies and evaluates three decision-making options that operate under identical uncertainty representations: an interpretable Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) scheme, a Deep Q-learning baseline, and a Dual Deep Reinforcement Learning (Dual DRL) architecture trained with a target Q-network scheme for stability, using a dueling (value/advantage) decomposition for Q-value parameterization. Beyond final placement performance, we assess policy behavior using stability-oriented metrics that quantify steering smoothness over time, providing additional operational insight into how decision policies respond as uncertainty evolves. The framework is integrated with an API for validation within an industrial geosteering simulator under realistic measurement noise and drilling constraints. Using identical geological realizations, operational limits, and reward definitions across methods, the experiments provide a controlled and high-fidelity evaluation of how alternative decision policies behave throughout the drilling process, rather than evaluating performance solely from the final well trajectory.