Automatic velocity picking by simulated annealing

Automatic velocity picking by simulated annealing

Yunyue (Elita) Li and Biondo Biondi

Abstract:

Manual velocity picking is an inevitable and tedious process in the petroleum industry. An ideal velocity model is both geologically significant and geophysically smooth. Velocity picking can be phrased as a nonlinear optimization problem with multiple contradictory objectives. In this paper, we develop an automatic velocity picking technique based on the Simulated Annealing (SA) Algorithm. Accuracy and smoothness of the velocity model are used as objective functions. To improve the convergence of the algorithm, we include prior knowledge of the velocity model in the initialization and the constraints. The algorithm is adapted for this problem and demostrated using a 2-D field example.