Patent ID: 8335677

Claim:
A method for forecasting production from a hydrocarbon producing reservoir, the method comprising: (a) defining an objective function, characteristics of a history-matched model of a reservoir and acceptable error E; (b) creating at least one geological realization of the reservoir representing a probable geological setting using the characteristics of the history-matched model of the reservoir; (c) for each geological realization, using a global optimization technique associated with the objective function to perform history matching by determining the difference between observed data obtained from the reservoir and simulated data in a series of iterative steps to obtain back propagated artificial neural networks acceptable models that are within acceptable error E, the global optimization technique comprising: (i) creating an initial population of parent models having discrete sets of parameters; and (ii) running simulations on, and calculating errors E for, the parent models; and (d) forecasting production of the reservoir based upon simulation runs of the acceptable models.