A Computational Analysis of Convex Combination Models for Multidimensional Piecewise-Linear Approximation in Oil Production Optimization

The lift-gas allocation problem with pressure-drop constraints and well-separator routing is a mixed-integer nonlinear program considerably hard to solve. To this end, a mixed-integer linear programming formulation was developed by multidimensional piecewise-linearization of pressure drop functions using standard (CC) and logarithmic (Log) aggregated models. These models were compared by means of a computational analysis, which indicates that the logarithmic model is faster than the standard one possibly because of the reduced number of variables and constraints.