Joint simulation of a building stone deposit using minimum/maximum autocorrelation factors

Quality of a natural building stone deposit can be characterised by some attributes such as tensile strength, uniaxial compressive strength and unit volume weight. There are spatial cross-correlations between these variables that should be reproduced when the geostatistical simulation methods are used for modelling such deposits. So it is needed to use multivariate techniques in that cases. Minimum/maximum autocorrelation technique which offers great advantages over standard full cosimulation, principal component simulation and stepwise techniques is used in this study to estimate quality-extractable area curves in a building stone deposit.

► A brief theory of Minimum/Maximum Autocorrelation Factor (MAF) is presented.
► Spatial cross-correlations between generated MAF factors are found to be so close to zero.
► Joint simulation of some quality attributes are done and the results are tested.
► Quality-exploitable area curves are estimated.
► Suitable extraction sequence of building stone blocks in deposit is determined.