In a deal that made few ripples outside the energy industry, two very large but relatively obscure companies, Rockwell Automation and Schlumberger Limited, announced a joint venture called Sensia. The new company will "sell equipment and services to advance digital technology and automation in the oilfield," according to the Houston Chronicle. Yet the partnership has ramifications far beyond Houston's energy corridor: It's part of a growing trend that sees major tech companies teaming with oil giants to use automation, AI, and big data services to enhance oil exploration, extraction, and production. Rockwell is the world's largest company that is dedicated to industrial automation, and Schlumberger, a competitor of Halliburton, is the world's largest oilfield services firm. Sensia will be, according to the press release, "the first fully integrated digital oilfield automation solutions provider."

Exploration of hydrocarbon resources is a highly complicated and expensive process where various geological, geochemical and geophysical factors are developed then combined together. It is highly significant how to design the seismic data acquisition survey and locate the exploratory wells since incorrect or imprecise locations lead to waste of time and money during the operation. The objective of this study is to locate high-potential oil and gas field in 1: 250,000 sheet of Ahwaz including 20 oil fields to reduce both time and costs in exploration and production processes. In this regard, 17 maps were developed using GIS functions for factors including: minimum and maximum of total organic carbon (TOC), yield potential for hydrocarbons production (PP), Tmax peak, production index (PI), oxygen index (OI), hydrogen index (HI) as well as presence or proximity to high residual Bouguer gravity anomalies, proximity to anticline axis and faults, topography and curvature maps obtained from Asmari Formation subsurface contours. To model and to integrate maps, this study employed artificial neural network and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) methods. The results obtained from model validation demonstrated that the 17x10x5 neural network with R=0.8948, RMS=0.0267, and kappa=0.9079 can be trained better than other models such as ANFIS and predicts the potential areas more accurately. However, this method failed to predict some oil fields and wrongly predict some areas as potential zones.

This paper has been withdrawn by the authors. We present a framework for sequential decision making in problems described by graphical models. The setting is given by dependent discrete random variables with associated costs or revenues. In our examples, the dependent variables are the potential outcomes (oil, gas or dry) when drilling a petroleum well. The goal is to develop an optimal selection strategy that incorporates a chosen utility function within an approximated dynamic programming scheme. We propose and compare different approximations, from simple heuristics to more complex iterative schemes, and we discuss their computational properties. We apply our strategies to oil exploration over multiple prospects modeled by a directed acyclic graph, and to a reservoir drilling decision problem modeled by a Markov random field. The results show that the suggested strategies clearly improve the simpler intuitive constructions, and this is useful when selecting exploration policies.