A novel casing program design method for managed pressure drilling based on artificial bee colony algorithm

At present, the casing program design of Managed pressure drilling (MPD) relies on artificial experience to determine the optimal pressure control parameters and wellbore Equivalent cycle density (ECD) in open hole section, which leads to heavy workload, lack of scientific basis for design and accuracy of results. By analyzing the feasibility of artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to solve the optimization problem of pressure control parameters, a casing program design method for MPD based on ABC algorithm is proposed. This method can intelligently and efficiently analyze ECD profile in the wellbore samples under different pressure control parameters, and accurately optimize ECD profile in the wellbore and its pressure control parameters according to the safe drilling fluid density window in the open hole section, so as to obtain the accurate maximum safe running depth of each layer casing. The example analysis shows that the ABC algorithm can optimize the maximum running depth of the second layer casing and its pressure control parameters in 370 steps, which not only reduces the workload of manual calculation, but also improves the scientificity of the design process and the accuracy of the design results.