A long-standing open problem in reservoir modeling in petroleum engineering is history matching, where a reservoir simulator is used to model the reservoir under study. A correctly calibrated simulator can be used for reservoir characterization and provides a cost-effective way of obtaining essential information about the reservoir. The history matching problem seeks to find a set of suitably adjusted input parameters of the simulator such that the simulator correctly predicts the fluid (oil, gas, water, etc.) outputs of the wells on the reservoir, over a period of time. Due to the sheer size of the problem, completely satisfactory results of history matching have been hard to achieve and are usually obtained with the aid of ad hoc methods.
This paper presents a novel idea of using a fuzzy controller for parameter adjustment in history matching that is being investigated at the New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology. We have conducted a preliminary study using a pseudo-miscible reservoir simulator, MASTER; out results indicate that satisfactory matches can be obtained using fuzzy controller, implemented with human experts’ knowledge, for automatic parameter adjustment. A promising approach for implementing fully automatic history matching is proposed.