Optimal control of polymer flooding based on mixed-integer iterative dynamic programming

Polymer flooding is one of the most important technologies for enhanced oil recovery. In this article, a mixed-integer optimal control model of distributed parameter systems (DPS) for the injection strategies is established, which involves the performance index as maximum of the profit, the governing equations as the fluid flow equations of polymer flooding and some inequalities constraints, such as polymer concentration and injection amount limitation. The control variables are the volume size, the injection concentration of each slug and the terminal flooding time. For the constant injection rate, the slug size is determined by the integer time stage length, and thus the integer variables are introduced in the DPS. To cope with the optimal control problem (OCP) of this DPS, a mixed-integer iterative dynamic programming incorporating a special truncation procedure to handle integer restrictions on stage lengths is proposed. First, the OCP with variable time stage lengths is transformed into a fixed time stage problem by introducing a normalised time variable. Then, the optimisation procedure is carried out at each stage and preceded backwards in a systematic way. Finally, the numerical results of an example illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.