How Designs Are Ranked
What the Automated Design score means: design score out of 10, cost weighting, estimated cost, and rank.
A design run returns dozens of valid designs. The ranking decides which one you see first. It happens in two passes: score the performance, then adjust for what the equipment costs.
Design Score
The engine grades every candidate against the evaluation criteria you set, based on its output values relative to the maximums.
The Raw Score column is that grade on a 0 to 10 scale where higher is better. A design at 9.4 sits close to the limits you set without breaking them; a design at 4 is straining against several of them.
The score is averaged across the dynamics grid, not taken from a single operating point, so a design is only rewarded if it holds up across the whole sweep of conditions. See the dynamics grid.
Use the raw score to answer "how good is this design on its own merits?", ignoring price.
Cost Weighting
A design that is 2% better and 40% more expensive is usually the wrong choice. The second pass folds equipment cost into the ranking.
The Cost-Weighted Score is the raw score adjusted by what the design costs relative to the other designs in the run. Cheaper designs of comparable quality move up; expensive designs have to be meaningfully better to hold their position.
This is the column the ranking uses. The Rank column is the position in the cost-weighted order, with ties broken by raw score and then by cost.
Estimated Cost
Est. Cost is the total equipment cost of the design:
| Component | Source |
|---|---|
| Pumping unit purchase price | The unit's price in Configurations |
| Additional costs | Installation, foundation, freight on that unit |
| Rod string | Price per rod for each diameter and grade, times the number of rods in each taper |
| Guides | Guide price per rod, times the number of guided rods |
A design shows Not priced when one of its rods or guides has no price in the rod group. No cost weight is applied to an unpriced design, so its cost-weighted score equals its raw score and it can rank above cheaper designs that are priced. Fill in prices for every diameter you enabled.
In Workover mode with Include installed unit on, the pumping unit already on the well is priced at $0, because you own it.
Rod Reuse
Workover runs add a Rod Reuse column: the length of existing rods the design keeps, divided by the total length of existing rods you entered. Higher means fewer new rods needed, and it feeds straight into the estimated cost.
Reading the Ranking in Practice
- Start at #1. It is the best cost-adjusted design the run found.
- Check its Raw Score against the designs below it. If #1 and #6 are within a tenth of each other, the difference between them is price, not performance.
- Look at Est. Cost across the top five. A large gap usually means a different pumping unit class.
- Open the top candidates in the Comparison tab to see where they actually differ.
The score reflects the criteria you gave it. If the top designs all look overbuilt, your limits are probably too conservative; if none pass, they are too tight. Adjust the criteria and rerun rather than reading further down the list.