A Classification-Based Surrogate-Assisted Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm for Production Optimization under Geological Uncertainty

Summary Multiobjective optimization (MOO) is a popular procedure for waterflooding optimization under geological uncertainty that maximizes the expectation of net present value (NPV) over all possible uncertainty models and minimizes the variance simultaneously. However, the optimization process involves a large number of decision variables, and the problem is computationally expensive. Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs), which have proved to be an effective way to solve expensive problems, design computationally inexpensive functions to approximate each objective function. On the basis of characterization, we have designed an efficient multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) to effectively deal with computationally expensive simulation-based optimization problems. The uniqueness of this algorithm is that it incorporates a Pareto-rank-learning scheme with surrogate-assisted infill criterion. The first is to introduce a multiclass error-correcting output codes (ECOC) model that directly predicts the dominance relationship between candidate solutions and prescreens, and the second is to train a radial-basis function (RBF) network that predicts the objective functions of prescreened solutions to calculate the hypervolume (HV) improvement that maintains convergence and diversity. Compared with typical surrogate-based methods, the developed method provides a classifier first that can enhance the accuracy in high dimensions and reduce computational complexity. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method compares with state-of-the-art surrogate frameworks for multiobjective production-optimization problems. In this paper, the proposed approach is applied to two 200D benchmark problems and two synthetic reservoir models. The results show that the proposed method can achieve more comprehensive and efficient reservoir management (RM) with a higher convergence speed compared with traditional MOEAs and surrogate-assisted optimization methods.