Patent Document ID: 7756694
Application ID: 11755572
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for interactive automation of fault modeling, comprising: sensing a fault-fault relationship between a pair of faults, wherein the sensing step comprises: computing models of each fault of a plurality of faults as if each were unrelated to any other fault of the plurality of faults; keeping unrelated models of said each fault up-to-date as new interpretation data is produced; and detecting a condition where data indicates that a fault of the plurality of faults being interpreted is in close proximity to one or more other faults of the plurality of faults thereby identifying one or more potentially related faults, wherein the step of detecting the condition where data indicates that the fault being interpreted is in close proximity to the one or more other faults comprises: in connection with said one or more other faults in a framework not including the fault being interpreted, determining whether a relationship should be ignored between said interpreted fault and each fault among said one or more faults; on the condition that said relationship should not be ignored, access a best-fit plane fault model and its transform, obtain a fault-fault connection distance, for each new interpretation point ‘P’, transform ‘P’ to a best-fit plane coordinate space, validate that ‘P’ projects onto a real part of said each fault, project ‘P’ onto said each fault as point ‘P prime’, determine whether ‘P prime’ is on a real part of the fault, determine whether a ‘P’ to ‘P prime’ distance is less than the fault-fault connection distance, and on the condition that ‘P prime’ is on the real part of the fault and the ‘P’ to ‘P prime’ distance is less than the fault-fault connection distance, mark said each fault as being in close proximity to the fault being interpreted; and displaying a final model which includes the pair of faults, the final model illustrating the pair of faults as being interconnected.