Adaptive prediction of Rate of Penetration while oil-well drilling: A Hoeffding tree based approach

Oil well drilling is an expensive process that needs a particular focus. For this reason, Rate Of Penetration (ROP) has been widely approved as a measure of drilling efficiency and adequate configuration parameters. Our aim in this work consists in the elaboration of a smart system using Hoeffding trees for predicting the Rate of Penetration (ROP) in oilfield drilling. The choice of Hoeffding trees to build our model is motivated by their adaptive learning capability and drift detection. They offer continuous, fast, and efficient learning both online on data streams and offline on batch data. To validate our approach, we used real drilling data from the “Hassi-Terfa” oilfield located in Southeast Algeria. The obtained results show in comparison to the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm that Hoeffding trees maintain their learning capacity and produce more accurate predictions even in the presence of drifts. This is thanks to the combination of the Adaptive Windowing (ADWIN) algorithm to manage drifts and least mean squares (LMS) filters to reduce noise. This observation highlights the effectiveness of our approach to predict the ROP while oil-well drilling. The proposed smart system offers more efficient solution to predict the ROP, whether in real-time or offline. By leveraging its adaptability to changes in data distribution, our approach ensures more accurate and adaptive predictions, facilitating drilling operations optimization and boosting the overall efficiency of the process.