Gary Howorth - Shaping the Oil and Gas Industry with NeuroSolutions!

Gary Howorth has been working in the oil and gas industry for 25-years and has a Degree in Electronic Engineering specializing in digital control theory and a MBA. Mr. Howorth has worked for several key corporations in the industry including BP, Arthur Andersen (Petroleum Services Group), PA Consulting and currently PFC Energy performing quantitative analysis on new and obscure modeling.

Mr. Howorth has been using NeuroSolutions, NeuroSolutions for Excel and the Custom Solutions Wizard for the past 2 years and originally started off using the Interactive Book. But he has been using neural net and adaptive technology for around 10 years. His interest lies in using innovative techniques to help bring insights to complex interactions in energy markets (including analysis of natural gas & oil prices), essentially “making sense of a complex world”.

Examples of the techniques used include using fuzzy-logic to describe the behavior in a negotiation between oil companies and neural net technology to capture behavioral traits in major oil and gas companies (both North American and International). This was based on PFC’s databases on operating & financial accounts over a 20-year period.

Because of the inherent non linear nature of the markets and business’ being analyzed, NeuroSolutions is an important tool in providing key insights, and it does this much better than other methods. In the main, Mr. Howorth has dealt with Clustering and Prediction problem types, using various neural network topologies such as Fuzzy-Logic (CANFIS) networks, Multi-Layer Perceptron’s (MLP) and Time Lagged/Delayed Neural Networks. Mr. Howorth chose NeuroSolutions over other competitive products because it provides him with the power to experiment with more complex topologies but at the same time is easy to use, especially through Excel. Simply put it has “more firepower than the competitive products”. The Interactive Book was also a great help and provides many alternative examples and ideas.