Optimization Algorithms for Short-Term Production Planning

In an oil and gas production system, where wells are connected to manifolds with multiple pipelines, a complex optimization problem arises. The objective will typically be to maximize the oil production, while respecting constraints on the system, such as the limited capacity of the processing facilities. Since the production is dependent on both the choke position and closing/routing of the wells, the optimization problem belongs to the class of mixed integer non-linear programming problems. This is in general a very difficult class of problems, and due to this, heuristics are often applied for solving them. FMC Technologies have developed an optimization engine for solving the problem, known as MaxPro, where the closing/routing part is solved by the use of heuristics. In this thesis, we compare MaxPro with metaheuristics such as tabu search and simulated annealing. They both showed promising results, in particular tabu search, and might be preferable to MaxPro.