Using Attribute Values of Rasters in ArcGIS Desktop?

Question

I have 4 Shapefiles which basically have 7 important fields and are basically looking like:

------------------------------------------------------------------
| Name | Connection 1 | Con 2  | Con 3  | Con 4 | Con 5  | Value |
------------------------------------------------------------------
|Tab1_A|    Tab2_A    | Tab2_B | Tab3_F | -     | Tab4_x |  10   |
------------------------------------------------------------------

So the first column contains the name of the polygon, the 2nd to 6th column contain Connections this polygon has with polygons from the other Shape-Files and the last column contains a value.

My Task is, to create a Raster, which contains the maximum sum of all values from connected shapes in one cell.

My current approach is:

1. Convert the 4 Shapes into 7 Rasters each (one per collumn)
2. 4 Raster Calculator: Tab1: Value + If(Con1 == Tab2.Name;Tab2.Value;0)+...
3. Another Raster Calc: MAX(Raster1,...,Raster4)

My Problem is, that I cannot compare the Name-Raster and the Connection-Rasters, because the Name is not the Raster-Value, but an Attribute.

Is there any way to compare an attribute in the Raster Calculator, or do you have a better idea, how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

Try merging all the shapefiles into one shapefile that contains all the fields. Then add a new field where the value is the sum of the connections from the 35 (5 connections x 7 shapefiles) connection fields. Then go vector to raster with the raster value being the newly created field.