Channel Simulation Using L-system, Potential Fields and NURBS

Channelized environments have huge implications in many fields, from hydrogeology to mineral ressources or geotechnic. Their modeling is so of prime importance. However, some of their characteristics make this a difficult task. This is especially the case of their high continuity that is arduous to preserve while ensuring data conditioning. We propose to rely on a formal grammar system, the Lindenmayer system or L-system, to stochastically generate the channel morphologies resulting of the deposition processes. The L-system considers a channel as a succession of channel elements and puts together those elements based on user-defined rules and parameters, such as the element size or the angle between two consecutive elements. The succession of elements is then interpreted to generate non-rational uniform B-splines (NURBS) representing straight to highly meandering channels. Conditioning to hard and soft data is done through the use of potential fields that define attractive or repulsive forces toward the data. L-systems appear to be highly flexible in the generation of various channel morphologies. Preliminary results show that the method manages to simultaneously honor conditioning data and preserve at best the channel variations defined by the parameters.