I'm trying to calculate the shortest paths from all the points in a layer representing population settlements (the green points) to any of the points in another layer representing the hospitals (orange points), going through the roads in blue.
The idea is to see where are the gaps in terms of public service delivery (here for health facilities). I've tried using GRASS, converted all the vector layers into graph vertexes and connected my points to the road network using the "v.net" tool but couldn't manage to go further with GRASS tools.
Having checked a number of other subjects on StackExchange, it seems to me I could be using pgRouting or Dijkstra’s algorithm, but it seems to me that those two tools only allow to find the shortest paths to definite destination. As I'm just beginning on QGIS - or Python for that matter - I could be mistaken, but I don't want to waste too much time learning a tool that wouldn't do the job in the end.
A closest facility tool apparently exists in ArcGIS, so I guess I would need something equivalent in QGIS.
Could you please guide me to the best tools to do this?
<datasource>../../../Student/asthecrowflies_stl_bphs_hub_lines2.shp</datasource>
refers to a location on your computer, but not on anyone else's. Have you ensured that all your source and target locations have equivalent locations that are located on the network edges? – alphabetasoup Nov 9 '15 at 17:14