Optimal placement design of inflow control valve using a dynamic optimization process based on technical and economic indicators

• Technical and economic information is used to speed up optimization.
• Reservoir simulation is used to generate technical and economic indicators.
• Indicators are used to select more plausible alternatives to start optimization.
• We propose a practical evaluation for studies which use time consuming simulations.

The placement design of inflow control valves in petroleum wells is based on the viability of their installation to improve the flow control from the reservoir to the well. Reservoir simulation is frequently used to represent valve operation and the forecasted production results are used to evaluate the benefits. In specific cases, the high number of variables involved in this problem and the time-consuming reservoir simulation makes traditional optimization methods inefficient to solve the problem within an adequate time frame. This work proposes a dynamic optimization process that uses economic and technical indicators to speed up the process. The main goal of the method is to reduce the number of variables and the search space of the problem by prioritizing well regions where a valve operation has more technical and economic potential. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, its results are compared with those of an evolutionary algorithm using a simple example. The methodology is also applied in a more complex example with different geological scenarios. The results show that the proposed method achieves good results when compared with the evolutionary algorithm. The design optimization in a complex example shows that the dynamic process is able to significantly increase the NPV of the field with an acceptable number of simulation runs. It is also shown that the use of economic and technical indicators can be applied to reduce the number of variables, to define suitable constraints for each variable and to help the initial seed-guesses for the optimization method. It is concluded that the proposed methodology can be efficiently used to optimize inflow control valve design in cases in which computational resources and available time are limited.