Parallel Automatic History Matching Algorithm Using Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Reformulating the history matching problem from a least-square mathematical optimization problem into a Markov Decision Process introduces a method in which reinforcement learning can be utilized to solve the problem. This method provides a mechanism where an artificial deep neural network agent can interact with the reservoir simulator and find multiple different solutions to the problem. Such a formulation allows for solving the problem in parallel by launching multiple concurrent environments enabling the agent to learn simultaneously from all the environments at once, achieving significant speed up.

Keywords

• artificial intelligence
• reinforcement learning
• parallel actor–critic
• history matching
• reservoir simulation