[R-sig-Geo] Least cost path

[hughsturrock]

Hi all, 

I am trying to model travel times to from any given point to its nearest
hospital (in rural Africa). I've been looking at doing this in ArcGIS and R
and it looks like if I can create a 'cost' raster, there are plenty of
functions like shortestPath in R {gdistance} and Cost Path in Arc that can
work this out. This is fine for factors like landcover, where the cost can
be assumed to be identical irrespective of which direction you are moving
through that pixel, but I'm having difficulty working out how I would asign
slope (from an elevation model) a cost given that the cost of a slope
depends on the direction of travel. Does anyone know of a way to model the
least costly path over an elevation raster which would account for the
direction of travel? That way I could look at both travel to and from the
hospital..
 
Thanks! 
Hugh 



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