Efficient history matching with dimensionality reduction methods for reservoir simulations

Oil reservoir history matching is a well-known inverse problem for predicting production by optimizing enormous unknown parameters with numerical simulation. Typically it can be formulated in a Bayesian framework with geological priors. Instead of gradient-based optimization with the possibility of converging to a local minimum, evolutionary algorithms have been introduced to globally find optimal parameters. Due to the high-dimensional parameters, the optimization could become inefficient; therefore, many dimensionality reduction algorithms have been applied in history matching. However, these methods suffer from the linear assumption or the pre-image problem, which could affect the model optimization. In this paper, based on the evolutionary algorithm termed Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition, which is capable of simultaneously optimizing the parameters with respect to the data of several oil wells, we propose history matching with dimensionality reduction by explicitly utilizing the nonlinear dimensionality reduction model Auto-Encoder to reduce the number of unknown parameters, which can naturally handle the pre-image problem and then improve model performance in terms of precision and complexity. Experimental results based on PUNQ-S3 data verify the efficiency of the newly proposed methods.