Modeling Well Scheduling as a Virtual Enterprise with Intelligent Agents

In today´s intensive competitive environment in the oil and gas industry, it is important to increase efficiency in production through resource management and well scheduling (resource scheduling, for short). However, resource scheduling has been a challenge for oil and gas companies for many years because it is influenced by a number of factors including environment, regulations, stakeholders, finances, the market, and approaches to determine and plan daily schedulable tasks This paper proposes a new approach to modeling well scheduling processes in oil and gas industry using the notion of virtual enterprise with intelligent agents and contract net protocol in multiagent systems technologies. This model will lead to a flexible well scheduling application that will assist in the scheduling of resources across the well lifecycle. We show the effectiveness of the approach by implementing an experimental system and giving a case study.