Terrain-Aware Route Planning and Risk Analysis: A Survey of GIS Least-Cost Path and A* Approaches

Author

Bhupati Sharma, Muskaan Sharma, Sahil Suryawanshi, KT Patil

Abstract

 Reaching a destination over rugged ground depends on more than distance: slope, land cover, water, existing roads and restricted areas all shape what is feasible and safe. Terrain-aware routing has been studied in hiking and pedestrian modelling, forest-road and infrastructure corridor design, disaster evacuation and robotic navigation, usually as separate application-specific efforts. This survey organises that literature along a single progression: terrain representation, DEM-derived features, traversability, cost-surface generation, multi-criteria GIS routing, least-cost-path and A*/D* search, alternative-route generation, risk-aware routing and modern 2022–2026 terrain-aware A* and learning methods. From a pool of 30 studies we analyse 10 priority works that cover complementary stages of the pipeline. We compare them, identify a defensible research gap—the limited emphasis on a unified, location-independent framework with heterogeneous layers, user-defined hard constraints and preferences, alternative routes and interpretable comparisons—and position our proposed Terrain-Aware Route Planning and Risk Analysis System as an integration and generalisation of established concepts.

Keywords

Terrain-Aware Routing, Least-Cost Path, Digital Elevation Model, Traversability, A* Algorithm, Multi-Criteria Evaluation, Risk Analysis, Evacuation Routing, GIS, Literature Review

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