The MATLAB Reservoir Simulation Toolbox (MRST) is a free open-source software for reservoir modelling and simulation, developed primarily by the Applied Computational Science group in the Department of Mathematics and Cybernetics at SINTEF Digital. The software has a large international user base and also includes third-party modules developed by researchers from Heriot-Watt University, NTNU, University of Bergen, NORCE, TNO, Louisiana State University, TU Delft and others.
LATEST RELEASE: Version 2024a was released on the 29th of April 2024, and can be downloaded under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). To be notified of new MRST releases please join the MRST-announce google group.
Like MATLAB, MRST is not primarily a simulator, but is developed as a research tool for rapid prototyping and demonstration of new simulation methods and modeling concepts. To this end, the toolbox offers a wide range of data structures and computational methods you can easily combine to make your own custom-made modelling and simulation tools. MRST nonetheless offers quite comprehensive black-oil and compositional reservoir simulators capable of simulating industry-standard models and also contains graphical user interfaces for post-processing simulation results.
The software is organized into:
a minimal core module offering basic data structures and functionality, and
a large set of add-on modules offering discretizations, solvers, physical models, and a wide variety of simulators and workflow tools.
In the modules, you will find many tutorial examples that explain and showcase how MRST can be used to make general or fit-for-purpose simulators and workflow tools. Using MATLAB for reservoir simulation may seem strange at first, but most of the tools and simulators are quite efficient and can be applied to surprisingly large and complex models (several real data sets are supplied with the software). For more computationally challenging cases, we recommend using the open-source OPM Flow simulator from the Open Porous Media initiative.
MRST has a large world-wide user base: altogether, the last releases have more than 25.000 unique downloads. If you have questions about the software, we encourage you to visit our user forum, which was launched in June 2016. We normally try to answer your post within a day or two, but sometimes it may take us a bit longer, e.g., during weekends or when we are approaching a deadline in one of the many research projects we run for various clients.
Publications
If you use MRST to write a scientific publication, we request that you cite the MRST book or one of our overview papers:
The MRST book introduces you to grids and petrophysics, discretizations and solvers for incompressible flow, and how you can combine automatic differentiation, a flexible grid format, discrete differential operators, and vectorization in MATLAB to develop fully implicit multiphase simulators. The book also teaches grid coarsening, upscaling, and flow diagnostics. The first two papers describe the object-oriented automatic differentiation framework in MRST, whereas the third paper explains how to implement discretizations and incompressible solvers over unstructured grids, using a procedural approach.
We encourage you to also look at the many publications that use MRST. Per November 2020, this includes 180 master and PhD theses and 400 journal and proceedings papers written by authors outside of the MRST development team.