Permeability Estimation of the Reservoir Based on Particle Swarm Optimization Coupled with Artificial Neural Networks

In this work we investigate how the integration of back-propagation (BP) with particle swarm optimization (PSO) improves the reliability and prediction capability of PSO. This strategy is applied to predict permeability in Mansuri Bangestan reservoir located in Ahwaz, Iran, utilizing available geophysical well log data. Our methodology utilizes a hybrid PSO BP. The particle swarm optimization algorithm was shown to converge rapidly during the initial stages of a global search, but around global optimum, the search process will become very slow. On the contrary, the gradient descending method can achieve faster convergence speed around global optimum and with greater accuracy. The proposed algorithm combines the local search ability of the gradient-based BP strategy with the global search ability of particle swarm optimization. PSO is used to decide the initial weights of the gradient decent methods so that all of the initial weights can be searched intelligently. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid PSO BP algorithm is better than the PSO algorithm in convergence speed and accuracy.