Novel Self-Adaptive Shale Gas Production Proxy Model and Its Practical Application

[Image: see text] Recently, production optimization has gained increasing interest in the petroleum industry. The most computationally intensive and critical part of the production optimization process is the evaluation of the production function performed by the numerical reservoir simulator. Employing proxy models as a substitute for the reservoir simulator is proposed for alleviating this high computational cost. In this study, a new approach to construct adaptive proxy models for production optimization problems is proposed. An adaptive difference evolution algorithm (SaDE) optimized least-squares support vector machine (LSSVM) is used as an approximation function, while training is performed using a self-adaptive response surface experimental design (SaRSE). SaDE selects the optimal hyperparameters of LSSVM during the training process to improve the prediction accuracy of the proxy model. Cross-validation methods are used in the recursive training and network evaluation phases. The developed method is used to optimize the production of block gas reservoir models. Computational results confirm that the developed adaptive proxy model outperforms traditional regression methods. It is further verified that when the experimental data are updated, the alternative model still has high prediction accuracy when performing the objective function evaluation. The results show that the proposed proxy modeling approach enhances the entire optimization process by providing a fast approximation of the actual reservoir simulation model with better accuracy.