Generate Shortest-Most Economic Route (path) in ArcGIS 10.1

[Arshadjkc]

Hi All,

I'm a final year student at the University of Mauritius.

I am doing my research project on "how to find the shortest possible route between 2 areas of the Island of Mauritius using GIS"

I am rather new to GIS but from what i have read, this can be done.

What i have is ArcGIS 10.1 and a set of Aerial Imagery (provided by the University) which is in some hundreds of tiles of .ecw , .ers and .eww

What I have been able to do by now is to load these tiles in ArcCatalog 10.1.

According to my supervisor, I should be diving the different portions of land, between those 2 areas depending upon their type of use and their conversion costs to roads...only the ArcGIS will be able to output a possible shortest route between these 2 points.

Can you people help me on how to proceed, or if its asking too much, can you direct me to tutorials of what i have do do.

From what i have seen on previous threads here, you people are very cooperaing, so please guys HELP!!!

I have only 6 weeks left.

Thanks

[Bruce1807]

do you have the network analyst installed?

[rahmansunbeam]

6 week? hmm.

The sorcery of finding nearest neighbor/shortest path is subjected to a topic called 'Computational Geometry'. In AG you'll need to use network analyst. But before that you'll need all the routes in vector format, not aerial photo. You'll also need a good network dataset, and for that a good amount of field work.

Best o' luck!

[Arshadjkc]

I do have network analyst, but will it be able to choose whether to generate a new road through:

• sugar-cane fields,
  
• mountainous regions,
  
• existing road
  
• residential agglomearations
  
• forests
  

if i use polylines and polygons to distinguish between them (so that the new route is most economic).

[rahmansunbeam]

Yes, you'll need that. There is a good tutorial at the help section of AG - 'About the ArcGIS Network Analyst extension tutorial'.

You can also use Spatial Analyst for more control.

[Arshadjkc]

Thanks.

I'll go through it after I'm done with ESRI's tutorial on Network Analyst

[yousef2233]

Using network analyst can help you when you have some roads between, what if there is no road or just one ?

1 - create a cost surface with modeling different criteria influencing the cost

2 - using distance toolset in spatial analyst seems to be helpful (extracting new roads is possible by it)

goodluck

[Arshadjkc]

Using network analyst can help you when you have some roads between, what if there is no road or just one ?

1 - create a cost surface with modeling different criteria influencing the cost

2 - using distance toolset in spatial analyst seems to be helpful (extracting new roads is possible by it)

goodluck

Thanks Yousef2233....just what i needed!!!