Reservoir simulation is an effective method to help engineers estimate the oil and gas resources and nearly all major reservoir development decisions are made based in some ways on simulation results. In practice, reservoir simulation is comprised of reservoir model building, history matching, and forecasting.
History matching is a required step before a reservoir model is accepted for making predictions of the future performance of the reservoir. History matching is the most time-consuming yet crucial part in reservoir study, with the objective to build a model that integrates all available data to reduce the uncertainties on production forecasts. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop and apply an efficient object-oriented framework to perform automatic history matching and reservoir development optimization. This software platform will have the following prominent features: computational feasibility, which means that efficient algorithms are needed; global search ability to avoid local optima; flexibility to deal with both continuous and discrete parameters simultaneously; generality to handle a wide range of problems that may be encountered in reservoir simulation case studies, such as
- Design and develop a module to fulfill automatic history matching using an effective method and optimization techniques.
- Design and develop a module integrating reservoir simulation, economic models and optimization methods for reservoir development. Then study well-operation related issues including the number, times, types, and locations of the new wells to be placed.
- Use high performance computing techniques such as parallel and distributed processing in the proposed modules to save computational time.
- Test the developed modules, apply them in case studies, and integrate into the framework.