Cost Paths from multiple starting points to one end point

[SanderFox]

Hi,

For my MA degree I'm currently studying the defensibility of some archaeological hilltop sites. For this, I want to do Least Cost Path analyses from points in a circle around the sites in question to the sites at the centre. Although I know how to do a usual Cost Path analysis from point A->B, I can't figure out what I need to do in my case, so I have a few questions.

1) Is there a way to get ArcGIS to generate points at regular intervals along the edge of a circle? Or is it only possible to do this manually?

2) How can I adapt the ModelBuilder model to calculate Least Cost Paths from multiple/all points around a site to the site itself simultaneously? I heard it's possible, but couldn't think of a solution for it myself. I must be overlooking something. Do I just make the same model over and over again for each starting point and then run it, or is there a faster way?

Thank you very much for any help you can give me.

All the best,
Sander

[MathewSchmidtlein]

Sander,

If you are doing cost distance analysis (rather than path distance), I would suggest this: input your end point in the model as a starting point.  This will calculate the least cost distance from every point in your study area to the hill top.  Then once you have your points around the hill defined, you can simply do a zonal function to determine the cost at each point.

This will only work, however, if you are using isotropic approaches to model cost distances.  This means that the direction of travel doesn't matter, and is implemented using the Cost Distance tool.  You can still do something like this using Path Distance, but you have to do a bit more work.

[SanderFox]

Thanks for the reply. I actually already figured it out, but thank you nonetheless 🙂 The points at regular intervals were easily done by using the Create Random Points tool with a min. distance of the circle perimeter devided by the numbers of points I wanted.

In the end I found a way to use iteration to loop through the table with sites and automate the generation of paths.