Quality Analysis of Geostatistical Simulations through their Connected Structures

Various methods have been developped to perform geostatistical simulations. Depending on the studied case, each of them can claim to obtain the best results, but it is rarely supported by an objective and quantitative analysis, especially concerning the geological structure reproduction. In this work we propose to go deeper into the assessment of realization quality through connected geobodies, focusing on the capacity to reproduce connected geological strutures. This quality assessment relies on quality indicators computed on each realization. The realizations are then compared based on a dissimilarity calculated from the indicators. The dissimilarity analysis is facilitated using multidimensional scaling (MDS) completed with heat maps. The application of this methodology to a synthetic case and associated realizations gives rise to some practical considerations. While MDS is a powerful tool to facilitate the analysis, it does not represent exactly the dissimilarities, leading to possible misinterpretations. Details considering the relationship between the realizations should preferably be analyzed on the heat map as it represents directly the dissimilarities. This connected geobody-based method appears to complete pattern histogram-based method, which less take into account pattern relationships.