Summary
Many methods have been proposed in the past to look at optimizing passive seismic arrays based on wide variety of design criteria. These have varied from ray illumination methods to error minimization within various inversion algorithms in use. There are many factors that come into consideration when dealing with array design problem. These may include operational factors, local geologic and structural attributes, resource constraints, etc. There is a need to approach this problem in a holistic fashion and to design and implement a method which caters to multiple design criteria comprehensively. In this work, we have designed and implemented a generalized workflow with the flexibility of adding any number of design elements as per requirement depending on the specific problem at hand. While the method draws upon optimization techniques that have been used in the past, the aim is to optimize for multiple design criteria simultaneously and to do so for relatively complex multi-array sensor networks. We demonstrate the validity of the developed algorithm by implementation on various models and highlight potential advantages as well as pitfalls involved with such complex optimization issues. Finally, we provide broad recommendations for simple multi-array design optimizations based on tests on our synthetic models.
