Closest Facility/Delete Identical Tool Help

EricStipe

Hello,

I am having a bit of a time figuring out a work around for a problem I have. Essentially, I ran a Closest Facility operation on a set of about 200 points. Each point is an entrance to a building, and the underlying network is walking paths. I have named each of my facilities and incidents based on building number, and ran the operation so that each building was a facility as well as an incident, producing routes to and from each building.

What I am looking for is for any given path, (1-2, 1-3, etc.), I would like the shortest route (in time). In the Route output, there are routes for each entrance. For example if building 1 has four entrances, there will be four routes from building 1 to building 2. I only want the shortest (time-wise) for each route.

This is where I thought I would be able to use the Delete Identical tool. I advanced sorted the table, first based on the name of the route, then on the travel time. After this sort, the first unique record for each route name (1-2) had the shortest time. However, Delete Identical appears to delete all but the lowest Object_ID. This is a problem because as the routes were created and subsequently exported, they did not go in the order that I want now, so the lowest Object_ID is not always the shortest time for a specific building to building route.


Any suggestions/comments would be much appreciated.


Thanks,

eric

curtvprice

I believe I have found an, albeit lengthy, workaround. I created a unique ID for each of the paths by concatenating the x midpoint, y midpoint, and z start point of each route (line). I then took the table out of ArcMap and into Excel and reordered the OIDs.

If you're using 10.0, the Sort tool will create a new feature class with new OIDs in the sorted order. I think that may make this task a quick ModelBuilder exercise.

If you want to set up your own custom unique identifier on a sorted table Calculate Field tool can be used to do this too. Note I mean a table sorted with the Sort_management tool, not just interactively sorted:

Expression (PYTHON):

uid(1)

Code Block:

i = None def uid(start):   global i   try:     i = i + 1   except:     i = start   return i