An Efficient Neural-Network-Based Microseismic Monitoring Platform for Hydraulic Fracture on an Edge Computing Architecture

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 18; no. 6; p. 1828
• Main Authors: Zhang, Xiaopu, Lin, Jun, Chen, Zubin, Sun, Feng, Zhu, Xi, Fang, Gengfa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 05.06.2018; MDPI
• Subjects: Accuracy; Computer centers; edge computing; event detection; microseismic monitoring; Neural networks; probabilistic inference; probabilistic inference; microseismic monitoring; edge computing; event detection; neural networks
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s18061828

Microseismic monitoring is one of the most critical technologies for hydraulic fracturing in oil and gas production. To detect events in an accurate and efficient way, there are two major challenges. One challenge is how to achieve high accuracy due to a poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The other one is concerned with real-time data transmission. Taking these challenges into consideration, an edge-computing-based platform, namely Edge-to-Center LearnReduce, is presented in this work. The platform consists of a data center with many edge components. At the data center, a neural network model combined with convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) is designed and this model is trained by using previously obtained data. Once the model is fully trained, it is sent to edge components for events detection and data reduction. At each edge component, a probabilistic inference is added to the neural network model to improve its accuracy. Finally, the reduced data is delivered to the data center. Based on experiment results, a high detection accuracy (over 96%) with less transmitted data (about 90%) was achieved by using the proposed approach on a microseismic monitoring system. These results show that the platform can simultaneously improve the accuracy and efficiency of microseismic monitoring.