Motivated by rising drilling operation costs, the oil industry has shown a trend towards real-time measurements and control. In this scenario, drilling control becomes a challenging problem for the industry, especially due to the difficulty associated to parameters modeling.

One of the drill-bit performance evaluators, the Rate of Penetration (ROP), has been used in the literature as a drilling control parameter. However, the relationships between the operational variables affecting the ROP are complex and not easily modeled. This work presents a neuro-genetic adaptive controller to treat this problem. It is based on the Auto-Regressive with Extra Input Signals model, or ARX model, to accomplish the system identification and on a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to provide a robust control for the ROP.

Results of simulations run over a real offshore oil field data, consisted of seven wells drilled with equal diameter bits, are provided.