Preface to the special issue 'Complexity in the Oil Industry 2007'

摘要

This special issue of Computational Geosciences is dedicated to a selection of papers presented at the conference Complexity in the Oil Industry, held in Natal, Brazil, in August 2007, www.coi2007.com. The meeting was organized by the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Natal and by Imperial College London. The aim of the conference was to bring together scientists from academia and from industry to discuss topics in the field of mathematics and physics which could find applications in the energy industry and particularly in the petroleum industry. As always, when using the word complexity, it is important to specify the intended meaning of the word. We perceive as complex those systems that are in between order and disorder, where the whole system displays regularities that are not present in the single constitutive parts.