Coevolution of simulator proxies and sampling strategies for petroleum reservoir modeling

Reservoir modeling is an on-going activity during the production life of a reservoir. One challenge to constructing accurate reservoir models is the time required to carry out a large number of computer simulations. This research investigates a competitive co-evolutionary algorithm to select a small number of informative reservoir samples to carry out computer simulation. The simulation results are also used to co-evolve the computer simulator proxies. We have developed a co-evolutionary system incorporating various techniques to conduct a case study. Although the system was able to select a very small number of reservoir samples to run the computer simulations and use the simulation data to construct simulator proxies with high accuracy, these proxy models do not generalize very well on a larger set of simulation data generated from our previous study. Nevertheless, we have identified that including a test-bank in the system helped mitigating the situation. We will conduct more systematic analysis of the competitive co-evolutionary dynamics to improve the system performance.