Industrial Revolution 4.

0:
The Solution to Complex Petroleum Engineering Challenges
The world has gone through three industrial revolutions already: steam power at the end of the 18th
century, electricity at the beginning of the 20th century, and Information Technology (IT) of the 1970s.
The 4th revolution has come with a “big bang” at a magnitude that surpasses those of the previous
revolutions. The 4th revolution is set to have a massive impact on our personal lives, disrupt the way we
conduct our teaching and research businesses, and may completely change the face of exploration,
development, and production in the petroleum industry. This revolution builds on the IT infrastructure
provided by the 3rd revolution to evolve recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of
Things, Big Data, Robotics, Nanotechnology, and 3D/4D Printing.

This project will focus on the AI aspect of the 4th industrial revolution and the role it is expected to play
in the alignment of the petroleum industry with the revolution. Despite that AI has been around for over
four decades, its application in the petroleum industry has been sparse and limited. Observations in
personal and group discussions have shown that the details of how AI works is still largely not very well
understood.

The students will be expected to familiarize with a succinct overview of the AI modeling process. Discuss
the challenges AI has been facing to gain acceptance and wide application in the petroleum industry.
Focus will be on Artificial Intelligence algorithms, such as Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic, Support Vector
Machines etc. The aim is to use these AI tools and solve prediction problems (for example, predicting
water saturation from log data where there is no possibility to take core measurements). It is advised that
the students gain enough data which will make the training process of the AI easy and robust, thereby,
making the predictions more reliable.

For starters, just look up ‘Applications of AI in Petroleum Engineering” on the internet to actually read
some literature and know exactly what this means. Finally, this is a very brief and short introduction and
I am aware that it might be confusing at first, but in real essence this is what the world is heading to, I.R
4.0.

Note:

This project will require intermediate MATLAB operation capability.