Machine learning-based fracture-hit
detection algorithm using LFDAS signal
Ge Jin1, Kevin Mendoza2, Baishali Roy1, and Darryl G. Buswell1
https://doi.org/10.1190/tle38070520.1.
Downloaded 06/22/20 to 130.238.7.40. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/
Abstract
Low-frequency distributed acoustic sensing (LFDAS) signal
has been used to detect fracture hits at offset monitor wells during
hydraulic fracturing operations. Typically, fracture hits are manually
identified, which can be subjective and inefficient. We implemented
machine learning-based models using supervised learning tech-
niques in order to identify fracture zones, which demonstrate a
high probability of fracture hits automatically. Several features are
designed and calculated from LFDAS data to highlight fracture-hit
characterizations. A simple neural network model is trained to fit
the manually picked fracture hits. The fracture-hit probability, as
predicted by the model, agrees well with the manual picks in
training, validation, and test data sets. The algorithm was used in a
case study of an unconventional reservoir. The results indicate that
smaller cluster spacing design creates denser fractures.
Introduction
Hydraulic fracturing completion design has a big impact on
the cost and production of unconventional wells. Plug-and-perf-
type completion has become popular in recent years due to its
high efficiency in creating more evenly distributed hydraulic
fractures in the reservoir. When designing a plug-and-perf comple-
tion, many parameters must be determined, including cluster
spacing, number of clusters per stage, number of perforations per
cluster, injection volume, proppant concentration, fluid type, usage
of diverter, etc. All of these parameters have an impact on induced
hydraulic fracture geometry, which is directly linked to production
performance. On the other hand, hydraulic fracture geometry is
also highly affected by reservoir rock property and local tectonic
stress. The completion parameters must be optimized regionally
to achieve the best economic results.
Fiber-optic sensing (FOS) technology has been used recently
for the completion and production surveillance of horizontal uncon-
ventional wells. It provides critical spatial information that can
assist completion optimization. FOS technology utilizes laser energy
scattered by impurities within fiber to measure temperature (dis-
tributed temperature sensing) and strain rate (distributed acoustic
sensing [DAS]) along the deployed fiber with high spatial resolution
(1–10 m). Many FOS applications are developed for unconventional
wells. The data can be used to evaluate perforation injection alloca-
tion for number of clusters per stage optimization (e.g., Boone et al.,
2015; Haustveit et al., 2017), stage isolation for plug design improve-
ment (e.g., Ugueto et al., 2016), crosswell communication for well
spacing and completion design optimization (e.g., Holley et al.,
2015; Jin and Roy, 2017), production logging to estimate completion
efficiency and reservoir quality (e.g., In ’t Panhuis et al., 2014; Swan
et al., 2018), etc.
ConocoPhillips, Houston, Texas, USA. E-mail: ge.jin@conocophillips.com; baishali.roy@conocophillips.com; darryl.g.buswell@conocophillips.com.
1
University of Utah, Department of Geology and Geophysics, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. E-mail: kevin.mendoza@utah.edu.
2
520 THE LEADING EDGE July 2019 Special Section: Machine learning applications
Perforation cluster spacing is a key control parameter of plug-
and-perf completion. Theoretically, cluster spacing should be
determined by reservoir permeability and stress anisotropy (dif-
ference between maximum and minimum horizontal stress). In
low-permeability reservoirs, large cluster spacing designs may
drain the reservoir inefficiently due to sparsely distributed hydraulic
fractures. On the other hand, if the cluster spacing is too small,
stress shadow interference between the nearby fractures may cause
inefficient fracture growth, which leads to unnecessary completion
cost (e.g., Sebastian et al., 2015).
A recent study by Jin and Roy (2017) demonstrates that the
low-frequency (<0.05 Hz) component of DAS signal recorded at
an offset monitor well provides critical information to constrain
hydraulic fracture geometry. This is one of the few technologies
so far that can locate fracture hits at an offset monitor well with
a spatial resolution less than 5 m. The data can be used to estimate
hydraulic fracture density, which is critical to determine cluster
spacing for plug-and-perf designs.
The fracture hits in the low-frequency DAS (LFDAS) signal
are interpreted as fiber locations that experience strong extension
(fracture opening) during the pumping period and strong but
gradually decreasing compression after the pump stops. In contrast,
the fiber sections that are adjacent to fracture hits should experience
compression (stress shadow) during the pumping period and
extension (relaxation) after pumping has stopped. The identification
of fracture hits in Jin and Roy (2017) relies on human interpretation
and manual picking, which is subjective and time consuming. To
generate an objective estimation of fracture-hit locations automati-
cally, we adopted the artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm
to solve this problem.
The ANN concept was developed originally by McCulloch and
Pitts (1943). It became popular in recent years due to rapidly increasing
computing power. The ANN algorithm loosely mimics the structure
of a biological brain by forming a connected network of artificial
neurons. The individual artificial neuron is a combination of input
weights and an excitation function. Using the back-propagation
algorithm (Werbos, 1974), ANN can adjust the weights in each
neuron, which allows the model to be trained to make predictions
based on the input data. To get a better prediction performance, we
extract several features from LFDAS signal as the ANN input. After
training using the manually labeled data, the ANN outputs
the probability of fracture hits occuring at each fiber location
during a certain stage. The probability can then be used to
analyze the effect of cluster spacing on fracture density.
We use an unconventional case study to demonstrate the
workflow implementation. In this data set, there are two designs
of cluster spacing; one is half of the other (double cluster number
 with same wellbore length). By applying the machine learning
workflow, we quantitatively estimate the impact of cluster spacing
on hydraulic fracture density.
Data and method
The DAS data were recorded at a pad with four instrumented
wells in an unconventional reservoir. A gun barrel view of the
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four wells is shown in Figure 1. The fracking sequence of the pad
is W1, W2, W3, and W4. W1 and W4 are completed with a
cluster spacing of L. W2 and W3 are completed with a cluster
spacing of 2L. Because the fracture-hit signal can only be observed
in a monitor well that has not been fracked (Jin and Roy, 2017),
only five injection-monitor well pairs can be used for this study
(orange arrows in Figure 1). The fiber cables are strapped outside
casing and cemented in place to ensure mechanical coupling with
the formation. The DAS data are recorded using 5 m gauge length
with 1 m channel spacing output, and the raw data are sampled
at 10 kHz. The data are first downsampled to 1 s after a low-pass
antialiasing filter and then 2D median filtered with a five-channel
and 10 s window. Data are further low-pass filtered with a corner
frequency of 0.05 Hz to get LFDAS data (Jin and Roy, 2017).
LFDAS data are then cut into sections by completion stages.
The time window for data splitting is selected to be one hour before
Figure 1. Gun barrel view of the well pad. Black double arrows indicate horizontal
and vertical well spacing, and orange arrows point from the injection wells to the
monitor wells.
Figure 2. LFDAS signal and features. The color map shows extension (red) and contraction (blue) of the fiber. Horizontal dashed lines indicate the locations of manual fracture-
hit picks. Thick vertical dashed lines are the beginning and ending of the pumping period. εd , FH (εd ), A, and FH (A) are calculated using data between the two dashed lines
(0.5–3.2 hours). εp and FH (εp ) are calculated from the data after the second dashed line (3.2 hours). D and FH (D) are calculated using the entire data frame.
Special Section: Machine learning applications
the pumping starts and two hours after the pumping stops for each
stage. There are 76 stages from five injection-monitor well pairs
being recorded. The fracture hits in the data are manually picked
to serve as a labeled data set. Because the spatial resolution of the
gauge data is five channels (meters), we label a five-channel window
to each manually picked fracture hit as positive samples.
The 2D (channel and time) LFDAS data are transformed into
eight 1D features in the channel axis. The features are designed
to characterize the fracture-hit signal from different perspectives.
A summary of feature symbols and descriptions can be found in
Table 1. εd is the summation of strain rate during the pumping
period. For this feature, channels with fracture hits should show
strong positive values, and channels in the stress shadow should
show negative values. In contrast, εp is the strain rate summation
two hours after pumping stops, where fracture-hit channels should
show strong negative values and the surroundings should show
positive. Feature A calculates the root mean square (rms) of
individual channel amplitude during the pumping period to
capture large amplitude variation at the fracture hits. Feature D
sums the absolute value of the difference between a channel with
the channels that are three channels apart (1 m channel spacing
and 5 m gauge length). Because the geometry of fracture hits is
usually smaller than DAS spatial resolution, the signal polarity
at fracture-hit channels should be different than channels half a
gauge length away. To better separate individual fractures and
enhance weaker fracture-hit signals, we applied a high-pass filter
in channel with a corner wavelength of 30 channels (100 ft) on
Table 1. Description of features.
Feature symbol Description
εd Accumulate strain during pumping
εp Accumulate strain post pumping
A rms of LFDAS data during pumping
D Difference between current channel and
nearby channels
FH High-pass filter with a corner wavelength
of 30 channels (30 m)
July 2019 THE LEADING EDGE 521
 these features to create four new features: FH(εd), FH(εp), FH(A),
and FH(D), respectively.
The features are then normalized based on individual injection-
monitor well pairs, as different well spacing may generate different
strain strength. Normalization is performed by standardization,
which makes each feature zero mean and unit variance. The
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normalization process can be presented as:
f −f
f′ = , stages, and 100 channels above the heel-most one to exclude
σ
where
f − f is the mean of feature f, and σ is the standard deviation
f′ =
of theσfeature. An example of the normalized features with com-
parison to the original LFDAS data can be seen in Figure 2.
To properly train the machine learning model, the data need
to be split into three data sets: training, validation, and test. The
training data set is used to train the machine learning model, the
validation data set is used to optimize hyperparameters of the
model, and the test data set is used to evaluate model performance.
In this study, we did not follow the conventional 60%/20%/20%
split of training, validation, and test data sets. Instead, we hold
Figure 3. The architecture of a selected neural network model.
Figure 4. Model prediction on the same stimulation stage at two different monitor wells. The data of monitor well 1 are in the training data set, and that of monitor well 2
are in the test data set.
522 THE LEADING EDGE July 2019 Special Section: Machine learning applications
all the stages in W1-W2 and W3-W4 well pairs as a test data set
with the hope of getting a more objective fracture density com-
parison between the two well pairs with same in-zone well spacing
but different cluster spacing designs. Within the three remaining
well pairs (W2-W4, W1-W4, W1-W3), 45 stages are randomly
selected as training data and 10 stages as validation data. For each
stage in the training and validation data set, we only select channels
within the range of 10 channels below the toe-most fracture-hit
channel to avoid interference from fractures generated by previous
low-amplitude negative samples. The channel selection created
6426 samples in the training set within which 794 samples are
channels labeled as fracture hits. The positive samples are dupli-
cated four times to increase their percentage in the training data
set to achieve better training performance.
Because the designed features can characterize fracture-hit
channels from the rest, we found that a simple three-layer neural
network model performs well in this case. The neural network
model has eight nodes in the input layer, 10 nodes in the hidden
layer, and one node in the output layer. The nodes in the model
are fully connected. We use the rectified linear unit function as
the activation function. The architecture of the neural network
is shown in Figure 3. The model takes in the values of the eight
features of a certain channel and outputs the fracture-hit probabil-
ity at the channel during a completion stage. We use F1 score to
evaluate model prediction. The final model scores 85% on the
training data, 86% on the validation data, and 79% on the test
data based on a 0.5 threshold.
Result and discussion
Figure 4 shows an example of model prediction for the same
injection stage at two different monitor wells. One of the LFDAS
data is from the training data set, and the other is from the test
data set. The data plotted in the left panel are the same as shown
in Figure 2. No obvious performance difference can be observed
between these two well pairs. Virtual examination shows a similar
prediction performance in all data sets.
To more objectively investigate the effect of cluster spacing
on fracture density, we reserved the well pair W1-W2 and W3-W4
as the test data set, which was not involved in the model training
 spacing. First, fracture-hit probability
prediction from different stages are
summed together, and a low-pass filter
with a corner wavelength of five chan-
nels is applied to smooth the curves.
Then, local maximums of the curves
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within the section marked in Figure 5

and with values larger than 0.5 are
identified as fracture-hit locations. The
CDF of the spacing between fracture
hits is calculated and plotted in
Figure 6. The fact that the blue curve
is always above the orange curve indi-
cates that the tighter cluster spacing
design (W1-W2) creates a denser
Figure 5. Probability of hydraulic fracture hits at monitor wells for W1-W2 and W3-W4 well pairs. (a) W1 was fracture network than the wider one
completed with cluster spacing L. (b) W3 was completed with cluster spacing 2L. Different colors indicate fracture (W3-W4). In a low-permeability shale
hits from different stages. Dashed box shows the depth range used for spectrum analysis. reservoir, this observation may support
tighter cluster spacing designs.

Conclusion
We adopted a machine learning algorithm to automate
fracture-hit identification on LFDAS data. Eight features are
developed to extract fracture-hit characters from the data and
serve as the model input. A simple neural network model was
trained to provide fracture-hit probability estimation from the
input. We applied the workflow in an unconventional case study.
The model prediction results and fracture-hit CDF analysis
indicate that smaller cluster spacing completion design creates
denser hydraulic fractures in the reservoir.

Acknowledgment
Figure 6. CDFs of fracture-hit spacing for W1-W2 (cluster spacing L) and W3-W4 The authors would like to thank ConocoPhillips ESOI and
(cluster spacing 2L). business unit management for permission to publish this paper.

process. The two injection-monitor well pairs have the same in-
zone distances (660 ft, as shown in Figure 1), but cluster spacing
of W1 is only half of the cluster spacing of W3. The model predic-
tion results, colored by stages, are shown in Figure 5. It is obvious
that W1 creates many more fracture hits than W3. However,
there are several design changes in terms of number of clusters
per stage along W3 that may impact fracture density. To better
compare the two, we select the sections where W1 and W3 have
the same number of clusters per stage but different cluster spacings.
The sections are marked by the dashed boxes in Figure 5. Within
the sections, there are 419 channels at each monitor well. A total
of 276 channels of W2 are identified as fracture hits from W1 by
the model, while only 216 channels of W4 are identified as fracture
hits from W3. By doubling the perforation cluster density, fracture
density increases by 28% at the in-zone monitor wells 660 ft away.
On the other hand, fracking order of the pad may impact
fracking performance. W3 was completed after W1 and W2.
The geometry of the fracture network W3 created may be affected
by the fracture system created by W1 and W2. To answer the
key question — whether the L ft cluster spacing design creates
a denser fracture network than 2L ft — we calculated the
cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the fracture-hit
Data and materials availability
Data associated with this research are confidential and cannot
be released.
Corresponding author: ge.jin@conocophillips.com
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524 THE LEADING EDGE July 2019 Special Section: Machine learning applications