3.5 Finding a Path Through the Graph

Overview

So far in the previous sections, we have:

• created a search corridor area from our departure waypoint to our arrival waypoint 

• divided the search corridor into sectors 

• identified all enroute waypoints within the corridor 

• connected the waypoints into a graph or network 

Finding the Shortest Path

The final step is to find a path through this network. We can use Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest path. Technically, we don't need the "shortest" path, since our requirements just ask us to find "a path", but we might as well use Dijkstra's algorithm because it's already built into the networkx library. Implementation looks as follows:

Here is the inspection output:

Here is the path as a geodataframe: