Stratigraphic Uncertainty Reduction Considering the Location of Additional Boreholes

Generally, the number of boreholes drilled in a project is constrained by the field investigative budget. How to select additional boreholes to increase the reliability of the deduced stratigraphic profile, or to reduce the uncertainty of the deduced stratigraphic profile, is an essential issue. This paper utilizes the stochastic Markov random field (MRF) to study the effect of added boreholes in a synthetic stratigraphic model. The information entropy is employed to quantify the stratigraphic model uncertainty. First, the parametric studies of borehole locations and MRF parameter were conducted. Then, the accuracy of MRF simulation was assessed by comparing the MRF-generated stratigraphic model with the synthetic stratigraphic model. The results show that (1) the average information entropy may be expressed as a quadratic function of the location of an additional borehole; and (2) the average information entropy decreases with the increase in stratigraphic anisotropic ratio and vice versa. Furthermore, the correlations among additional borehole location, stratigraphic anisotropic ratio, and average information entropy were obtained using multivariate regression analysis.