what makes cost distance more handy than in common Euclidian Distance?. See the two pictures below.


the euclidian Distance only measure direct distance from one point or object to another, regardless the morphology of the area both as a barrier or as a easiness. Best thing to explain it is with example. suppose you are in building A in the 11th floor, you friend is on the other building B on the 11th floor next to Building A with the distance of , say, 20 meters. In Euclidian Distance, it only measures the direct distance between you and your friend which is 20 meters. In reality, you have to move down , taking the stairs, elevators, or lift, walk, and take stairs in building B to meet your friend, with the total real distance, say 250 meters.
In cost distance, it calculates the friction in it process. in IDRISI Cost Distance module, first you have to have a raster point mentioning your center of object, this is the point where the distance will be measured. and the second image is the raster image of friction surface. To have friction surface, you have to convert your surface either land use or road into the friction classes.
what is friction classes? suppose i use road as a friction image. We have highway, arterial , collector, railways, and others road. How we put our new classes? suppose you want to travel as far as 100 km. If you travel in highway road, you will reach your end point in 1 hour, assuming your velocity is 100 km/hour. If you travel on arterial road, it takes 2,5 hours with velocity 40km/h. and in collector, say 3,5 hours, and others road 5 hours. ONE thing that we take it carefully is friction classes for non-road, which is in reality is the land. We can assumed as foot walking velocity which is 5km/h, so in our case, we will reach 100km after we travel for 20hours.
all this time will be our FRICTION COST. highway 1 (base cost), arterial (2,5), collector (3,5),,,,,,, bare soil (20)
we save it in AVL type of file, and run the wizards.
for my area, it was about 4 hour to run this process. I did it 3 times iteration, so,,,12 hours.
the first unit displayed in the output is in GCE unit (I forgot the abbreviation). the thing is, 5 gce means if you travel by your base situation (in highway) in certain time, you will reach 5 cells. In my case, to take 100km, it needs 6666 cells. if I assume my velocity in highway is 100km/h, this means 6666cells/60 minutes. 1000cell per minute. I use SCALAR to convert the unit of GCE into minute
happy is you can response it