A Global Integration Platform for Optimizing Cooperative Modeling and Simultaneous Joint Inversion of Multi-domain Geophysical Data

This paper reviews the theoretical aspects and the practical issues of different types of geophysical integration approaches. Moreover it shows how these approaches can be combined and optimized into the same platform. We discuss both cooperative modeling and Simultaneous Joint Inversion (SJI) as complementary methods for integration of multi-domain geophysical data: these data can be collected at surface (seismic, electromagnetic, gravity) as well as in borehole (composite well logs). The main intrinsic difficulties of any SJI approach are the high computational requirements, the non-uniqueness of the final models, the proper choice of the relations between the different geophysical domains, the quantitative evaluation of reliability indicators. In order to face efficiently all these problems we propose and describe here a "systemic approach": the algorithms of modeling and SJI are merged with an integration architecture that permits the selection of workflows and links between different algorithms, the management of data and models coming from different domains, the smart visualization of partial and final results. This Quantitative Integration System (QUIS) has been implemented into a complex software and hardware platform, comprising many advanced codes working in cooperation and running on powerful computer clusters. The paper is divided into two main parts. First we discuss the theoretical formulation of SJI and the key concepts of the QUIS platform. In the second part we present a synthetic SJI test and a case history of QUIS application to a real exploration problem.