Well Placement Optimization under Uncertainty with CMA-ES Using the Neighborhood

In the well placement problem, as well as in many other field development optimization problems, geological uncertainty is a key source of risk affecting the viability of field development projects. Well placement problems under geological uncertainty are formulated as optimization problems in which the objective function is evaluated using a reservoir simulator on a number of possible geological realizations. The existing approaches to cope with geological uncertainty require multiple reservoir simulations (on the possible realizations) to estimate the expected field performance for a given well configuration, which is often very demanding in CPU time and impractical when dealing with real field cases.