Designing an expert system for risk assessment in exploration & development oil ‎and gas fields

In order to assess the risk of exploration and development of oil and gas fields, which is mentioned as one of the ‎most important determining parameters in the economic development of oil- countries, an expert system using ‎the inference fuzzy system approach was designed. First, the system inputs, which are in fact the characteristics ‎of risk assessment for the exploration and development of oil and gas fields, were extracted. In continuation, ‎the knowledge base of the system, the most important part of which is considered to be in the form of if-then ‎rules and based on the opinions of experts in the upstream part of the oil industry. To do this, the degree of ‎system accuracy is measured in two stages based on expert comments. Based on the Likert scale and presenting ‎a questionnaire to the experts, Student's t-test was performed and out of 48 defined indicators, 42 indicators ‎were selected as the final index. In the next step, the data validation of an oil field in the south of the country ‎was provided to the oil industry experts and they were asked to evaluate the output of the system‏.‏‎ Finally, the ‎opinions of experts were compared with the output of the expert system and based on the criterion of mean ‎square error (MSE) and a small difference between the average opinion of experts and the output of the system, ‎it was determined that the designed expert system has sufficient accuracy and validity for future studies.‎