There are many powerful R packages that allow users to perform network analyses. However there currently isn’t the built-in functionality to use these analyses on spatial datasets. To study a road network for example, you need to convert the shapefile GIS format into an object that is accepted by a package like ‘igraph’. I provide an example on how to perform these conversions and use network analysis to find the shortest route between two locations in the road network.
Project link: https://github.com/jlmartin3/SpatialNetwork