An adaptive robust optimization scheme for water-flooding optimization in oil reservoirs using residual analysis

Model-based dynamic optimization of the water-flooding process in oil reservoirs is a computationally complex problem and suffers from high levels of uncertainty. A traditional way of quantifying uncertainty in robust water-flooding optimization is by considering an ensemble of uncertain model realizations. These models are generally not validated with data and the resulting robust optimization strategies are mostly offline or open-loop. The main focus of this work is to develop an adaptive or online robust optimization scheme using residual analysis as a major ingredient. The models in an ensemble are confronted with data and an adapted ensemble is formed with only those models that are not invalidated. As a next step, the robust optimization is again performed (i.e., updated/adjusted) with this adapted ensemble. The adapted ensemble gives a less conservative description of uncertainty and also reduces the high computational cost involved in robust optimization. Simulation example shows that an increase in the objective function value with a reduction of uncertainty on these values is obtained with the developed adaptive robust scheme compared to an open-loop offline robust strategy with the full ensemble and an adaptive scheme using Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF), which is one of the most common parameter estimation methods in reservoir simulations.