The scheduling of drilling and hydraulic fracturing of wells in an unconventional oil field plays an important role in the profitability of the field. A key challenge arising in this problem is the requirement that neither drilling nor oil production can be done at wells within a specified neighborhood of a well being fractured. We propose a novel mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for determining a schedule for drilling and fracturing wells in an unconventional oil field. We also derive an alternative formulation which provides stronger relaxations. In order to apply the MILP model for scheduling large fields, we derive a rolling horizon approach that solves a sequence of coarse time-scale MILP instances to obtain a solution at the daily time scale. We benchmark our MILP-based rolling horizon approach against a baseline scheduling algorithm in which wells are developed in the order of their discounted production revenue. Our experiments on synthetically generated instances demonstrate that our MILP-based rolling horizon approach can improve profitability of a field by 4–6%.

非常规油田的井眼钻井和水力压裂调度对油田的盈利能力起着重要作用。该问题引起的关键挑战是要求在裂缝的特定井附近的井中既不能进行钻井也不能进行石油生产。我们提出了一种新颖的混合整数线性规划（MILP）公式，用于确定非常规油田中钻井和压裂井的时间表。我们还推导了提供更强松弛效果的替代配方。为了将MILP模型应用于调度大型字段，我们推导出了一种滚动层方法，该方法解决了一系列粗略的时标MILP实例，从而获得了每日时标的解决方案。我们将基于MILP的滚动视野方法与基准排程算法进行基准比较，在基准排程算法中，油井按打折后的生产收入顺序进行开发。我们对合成实例进行的实验表明，基于MILP的滚动层方法可以将油田的盈利能力提高4–6％。