Using Expert Systems Technology as Knowledgebase and Learning Systems in Hydrocarbon Exploration Programs

By

Mohammed A. Tayyib¹

(1) Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

 Searching for hydrocarbon is a very sophisticated scientific process. Over the years, large wealth of knowledge and experience have been accumulated and passed from one generation of explorationists to the other. Advancement in computing technology played a key role in automating these processes and capturing of the exploration data. Advancement in application integration and visualization technology enabled the explorationist to get more out of the exploration data. However, as the volume of data is getting larger and larger, the technology is getting more and more sophisticated and the active explorationists generation is getting older, the need to capture their knowledge and experience in a systematic approach and made their knowledge accessible to future generation explorationist is highly needed.

For many years, the oil industry has been attempting to utilize the Expert System technology to capture the knowledge of their experts to make it accessible for younger generation. Many success and failure stories have been reported in the literature.

In this paper, a survey of the industry attempts in building Expert System applications is given along with the some insight for each approach and some of the analysis of their success or failure drives. A highlight of some of the current active research in this area will also be presented. The paper will be concluded with recommendation of a new approach to tackle this old dream using the latest advancement in computing technologies.