4-7 Connectivity Analysis

Connectivity analysis is to analyze the connectivity between points, lines and areas in terms of distance, area, travel time, optimum path etc.

Connectivity analysis consists of the following analyses.

Proximity Analysis: proximity analysis is measurement of distances from points, lines and boundaries of polygons. One of the most popular proximity analysis is based on "buffering", by which a buffer can be generated around a point, line and area with a given distance as shown in Figure 4.8. Buffering is easier to generate for raster data than for vector data.

Proximity analysis is not always based on distance but also time. For example, proximity analysis based on access time or travel time will give the distribution of time zones indicating the time to reach a certain point.

Figure 4.9 shows walking distance in time (contour lines of every 10 minutes) to the railway station.

Network Analysis: network analysis includes determination of optimum paths using specified decision rules. The decision rules are likely based on minimum time or distance, maximum correlation occurrence or capacity and so on.

Figure 4.10 shows two examples of optimum paths based on minimum distance and time respectively.