Artificial Bee Colony ABC a Potential for Optimizing Well Placement – A Review

Many optimization tools exist for well placement into reservoirs for maximum oil recovery. Conventional tools such as simulated annealing, response surface technology, gradient-based optimization, mixed integer programming etc. abound. However, artificial intelligence optimization tools have emerged over the years and are gaining ground. Artificial bee colony (ABC) has become one of the most common optimization methods in the domain of Artificial Intelligence since it was first conceived in the early nineties. As a result, avalanches of researches to its credit in well placement optimization exist. This paper therefore, highlighted conventional well placement optimization tools and also reviewed the artificial intelligence based optimization tools especially ABC and hybrids of ABC Algorithms formulated for well placement and compared them with each other using four basic criteria. The review has shown that ABC algorithms are very efficient in handling the placement of wells in reservoirs during well planning. This work therefore opens up a new vista in the area of well placement optimization and is therefore recommended to anyone looking for a pivot on the well placement optimization discussion.