Discussing either igraph or travelr in detail here is probably off-topic.

igraph has its own active discussion list:
(http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/igraph-help).

Travelr has irregular support available at this time; questions have the best 
chance of being answered if directed to the travelr discussion list:
(http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/mailman/listinfo/travelr-discussion).

Questions related to these packages would be better directed to one of those 
two resource lists.  Both packages contain some references to books and 
articles describing the structures and operations, and igraph has a gradually 
developing help page.

That said, here's a basic review of how to start constructing a graph or 
network for analysis in these packages:

To use spatial data as a network in either of these packages, the data must be 
disassembled into suitable structures that can be used to construct the 
internal representations used in each package (the representations are 
different but closely related).

For analysis by either igraph or travelr, a road network is conceptually simply 
a graph, and often a directed graph.  To use either of these packages, it is 
easiest to start with a tabular representation of the network as vertices (in 
the language of graphs) or nodes (in the language of highway modeling), plus 
edges (igraph) or links (travelr).

The vertices (nodes) are stored as a vector of numbers from 0 to N-1 (igraph) 
or 1 to N (travelr).  The travelr package further identifies the first Z nodes 
(Z <= N) as "zones", which are the sources and sinks of flows assigned over the 
network.

The roads themselves are modeled as edges (links):  at a minimum, this is a 
matrix or data frame with one row per edge and two columns indicating which 
vertices are connected by each edge.  travelr wants the links (edges) to be 
directed, so there should be a link (edge) for each direction of travel (thus, 
a link from A to B, and another link from B to A, unless the facility is "one 
way").  In addition, for routing applications, both packages will work with a 
vector of edge weights (igraph) or costs (travelr) which are used to construct 
shortest paths across the network between nodes of interest.  In igraph, the 
weights are stored as a graph attribute, in travelr, the weights are kept as a 
vector within an assignment set structure (a classed list; see the travelr 
documentation -- this is more complex to set up, but greatly facilitates coding 
the applications to which travelr was designed to be applied).

>From those basic elements, one constructs a graph (highway network) and both 
>packages have instructions for doing this.  Then there are various functions 
>for building shortest paths with weights and (in the case of travelr) 
>performing additional operations on the links associated with the shortest 
>paths.

Igraph is well-developed theoretically and is (once one gets over certain 
quirks, such as zero-based vertex numbering) very usable.  Travelr is a work in 
progress and is probably best ignored unless one is ready to read the code in 
detail (the lower-level functions have been much more extensively tested than 
the higher-level ones).  Travelr requires more work to set up and process 
networks, but can be used directly for certain types of analyses that would 
require considerably more coding in igraph.

I hope that helps.

Jeremy Raw, P.E., AICP
FHWA Office of Planning
jeremy....@dot.gov
(202) 366-0986


-----Original Message-----
From: r-sig-geo-boun...@stat.math.ethz.ch 
[mailto:r-sig-geo-boun...@stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Ricardo Rodríguez
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 5:42 PM
To: r-sig-geo@stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: [R-sig-Geo] creating network road

hello, how to create a network of roads, I am looking igraph and Travelr 
packages but I'm not sure how to enter the network and how to create these 
packages or other of R, since only the documented functions of the same but 
File no treatment, someone I could respect or arientar ahy books treat the 
topic.

thanks for the help and time

Ricardo Rodríguez
Univalle

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