Theory of Fluid Flows Through Natural Rocks

Mechanics, the oldest branch of physics, to this day remains the basis for modern technology. This is especially evident with regard to the oil and gas industry. Almost all of the technological processes in these branches of industry, from the drilling of wells to the transporting of oil and gas products via pipelines, are mechanical in their nature. The processes of the development of oil and gas deposits are of primary importance in the whole technological chain of oil and gas extraction from the rocks and their transportation to the customer. The use of scientific methods for improving technology is a long-established tradition of oil and gas industry. For the Western reader, it is enough to mention the fundamental treatises by the outstanding American research scientist and engineer M. Muskat (1937, 1949) as well as the excellent books of Scheidegger (1960) and Collins (1961) which combine practical goals with profound theoretical analysis. The initiators of the application of mechanics for solving problems of the oil and gas industry in the U.S.S.R. were V.G. Shukhov (1981) and LS. Leibenzon (1934, 1947, 1953, 1955) whose works constitute admirable examples of Soviet technical thought. During recent times, the magnitude of oil and gas extraction has increased immensely and many reservoirs with complicated physical and geological properties have, therefore, entered into the development. The fundamental problem of enhancing oil and gas recovery from rocks has been intensively and deeply analyzed.

This book contains substantially extended and revised versions of the best papers from the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2010), held in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, June 8-12, 2010.

Two invited papers are presented together with 39 contributions, which were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 full papers presented at the conference (out of 448 submissions). They reflect state-of-the-art research work that is often driven by real-world applications, thus successfully relating the academic with the industrial community. The topics covered are: databases and information systems integration, artificial intelligence and decision support systems, information systems analysis and specification, software agents and internet computing, and human-computer interaction.