Part 6/14:
Evaluation: Applying economic criteria—like net present value (NPV)—to score each configuration based on predicted oil/gas revenues and operational costs.
Iterative Optimization: Running multiple simulations, but due to high computation cost (hours to days per simulation), this process is slow.
The challenge is to reduce the number of simulations without compromising the quality of results, thereby accelerating decision timelines.
The Blackbox Optimization Challenge
The core computational difficulty lies in the nature of the cost or objective function. It is:
Expensive to evaluate: each simulation consumes extensive computational resources.
No gradient information: physical models are complex and noisy; derivatives can't be computed reliably.