Posts for the month of April 2009

Network analysis using GRASS

I ended up wanting to analyze commute paths on several networks, but instructions on how to properly prepare a network file with new points snapped to it as nodes was a little less than clear. I'm not 100% sure this is right but it is pieced together from the command history  GRASS stored with each layer in my mapset. 

#bring the layer in
v.in.ogr -o dsn="/scratch/congelton/davis_ped_net/ped_net_sep28.shp" output="pednets28" min_area=0.0001 snap=-1

#find the nearest line to a point and create a line that connects them
v.distance -p from="davissubset@PERMANENT" to="pednetsep28" from_type="point" to_type="point,line,area" from_layer=1 to_layer=1 output="ppl2pednet" dmax=-1 upload="dist" column="dist"

#add categories to the distance lines(I think this is required otherwise v.net won't work later, if the cat column is already populated then you can skip this)
v.category input="ppl2pednet" output="ppl2pednetcat" type="point,line,boundary,centroid,area" option="add" cat=1 layer=1 step=1

#patch the distance lines to the to the original points, so you have the nodes for v.net
v.patch input="ppl2pednetcat,pednets28" output="pplpednet"

# patch the distance lines to the network
v.patch input="pplpednet,davissubset" output="pplonpednet"

#I ran a clean before I did the actual v.net command to make sure I dropped things that wouldn't work, outliers
v.clean input="pplonpednet" output="pplonpednetclean3" type="line,point" tool="snap,break" thresh=3,3

#run the network shortest path using the original points as starting points and end points in batch from a csv, the point id is it's cat
v.net.path input="pplonpednetclean3" output="dcommute3" type="line,boundary" alayer=1 nlayer=1 file="pplonpednetclean.csv" dmax=1000


#example of the csv
#autonumber,Start node cat, end node cat
1       1       3000
2       5       3000
3       6       3000
4       7       3000
5       8       3000
6       9       3000
7       10      3000
8       14      3000
9       15      3000
10      25      3000
11      26      3000
12      27      3000
#yes all my people traveled to the same end point

Things to watch out for:

  • A network file should have both lines and points with the same layer number(ie 1_points 1_lines)
  • A network file with no cat column in the points component