A Machine Learning Method to Infer Inter-Well Connectivity Using Bottom-Hole Pressure Data

In the production and development of oil fields, production wells generally produce at a constant rate since the fixed production is easier to control than the fixed pressure. Thus, it is more feasible to use bottom-hole pressure data for connectivity analysis than historical injection and production data when producers are set in fixed rates. In this work, a practical procedure is proposed to infer inter-well connectivity based on the bottom-hole pressure data of injectors and producers. The procedure first preprocesses the bottom-hole pressure based on nonlinear diffusion filters to constitute the dataset for machine learning. An artificial neural network (ANN) is then generated and trained to simulate the connection relationship between the producer and its adjacent injectors. The genetic algorithm (GA) is also introduced to avoid the tedious process of determining time lags and other hyper-parameters of ANN. In particular, the time lag is normally determined by subjective judgment, which is optimized by GA for the first time. After optimizing the parameters, the sensitivity analysis is performed on the well-trained ANN to quantify inter-well connectivity. For the evaluation and verification purposes, the proposed GA and sensitivity analysis based ANN were applied to two synthetic reservoirs and one actual case from JD oilfields, China. The results show that the calculated connectivity conforms to known geological characteristics and tracer test results. And it demonstrates that the presented approach is an effective alternative way to characterize the reservoir connectivity and determine the flow direction of injected water.