A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1991

Contour maps are a very important tool for urban planning, route selections, Geology analysis, etc. It is necessary to choose a good contouring method and develop a computer package that is able to generate contour maps automatically. In the present study, three methods have been considered. The first method is a gridding local fit by moving average, the second a gridding global fit by Kriging and the third a triangulation by Delaunay triangle. In the Kriging method four models to fit the semi- variogram --linear, exponential, Gaussian, spherical -- were also considered. Several data sets were selected to test the performance of these methods. From the comparisons carried in the study, is appears that no method is good in all cases. As such, three programs were developed for the three methods to constitute a useful software package because they can help the user in their actual directions where any model is possible.