L. Douglas Patton, Corod, Inc.; Frank M. Pool, JR., Media Systems, Inc.
The use of simulation in petroleum engineering is not new; pipeline and refinery simulation and simulation of reservoir performance have been widely used in the past. However, in recent years there have been major improvements in the ability to simulate rod pumping situations, such as the use of mathematical expressions and equations (derived from API RP 1lL) to capture succinctly complex interrelationships which heretofore could not be easily related. The model is then manipulated on the computer to see what might happen in reality if the relationships were fixed or varied in specific ways. Because every system is in some state of dynamic adaptation to its environment (everything outside the system boundaries that has some influence on the system), there will always be problems to be solved. This is where the use of an abstract system simulation model proves advantageous. Simulation is just a numerical method used as a means of finding successive states of a situation or system by repeatedly applying the rules by which the system is operated