Drilling Rate Optimization by Automatic Lithology Prediction Using Hybrid Machine Learning

It is essential to obtain valuable information during drilling from the formation that is being drilled for rate optimization. In the drilling operation, the process of lithology and formation determination is extremely obscurant and it seems machine learning, as a novel prediction method that can model complicated situations having a high degree of uncertainty, could be beneficial. In this work, the real-time drilling data was applied to predict the formation type and lithology while drilling that formation using a genetic algorithm and Taguchi design of experiment optimized artificial neural network. Drilling data of twelve wells in one of Iranian gas fields were applied for this work. 47500 sets of data were selected, and after data control, 31200 data sets were selected as valid data and imported to artificial neural networks. For performing this research, by changing the network features and optimizing the structure of the network using the Taguchi method and optimizing the weight and biases of the network using the genetic algorithm, a unique artificial neural network was designed. The results show that the developed hybrid machine learning method can predict formation and lithology with a high degree of accuracy.