Optimal Route Planning in Oil and Gas
Multi-class field work and constraint-aware crew dispatch at 125+ assets per operator.
A modern shale operator dispatches a pumper across 100 to 300 producing assets per shift, juggling six classes of work at once: scheduled maintenance, reactive failures, regulatory deadlines, risk-based visits, liquid management, and routine gauging. The decisions interact. A hauler dispatched late shuts in a well. An inspection missed by an hour erases a month of capture credit. This paper shows the problem is genuinely intractable by hand, and that a system built for it moves 35% of site visits out of the field while improving free cash flow 15% on the same crew.
What is inside
- The combinatorial reality: why both manual planning and generic routing tools fail at field scale.
- The activity-based FP&A model that turns every dispatchable activity into a dollar score.
- The reservoir-to-custody-transfer physical chain that grounds the economics.
- A formal risk model with regulatory, safety, and operator-qualification tiers.
- The MC-VRPTW-S formulation: multi-class routing with synchronization constraints.
- An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search solver scaled to 200 to 600 tasks across 10 to 40 crews.
- Online re-optimization and multi-day rolling-horizon planning.
- Field-validated empirical results from a 5,000-well, three-basin deployment.
Field-validated outcomes
Measured over a 12-month deployment at a top-25 private producer across three basins (Western Anadarko, Permian, and Wyoming): 5,000+ wells, roughly 200 producing pads, 80 disposal and central facilities, and 10 to 40 active crews per day. Same wells, same crews, measured against pre-deployment baselines.
Outcomes are specific to this deployment and calibration. New basins, equipment classes, or operating philosophies require a calibration period before results match these benchmarks.
The route plan that runs your field by 6 AM
The research is the why. WellOPS Route Optimizer is the how: the ranked, constraint-aware plan in every truck cab, scored on cash flow and risk instead of distance.