Too slow to load geographical barrier into network analyst layer - 45 minutes for a state-big barrier

Question

Hello ESRI team:

I tried to conduct routing analysis with geographical barrier in my study but it appears to take too long time (~45 minutes) to load a geographical barrier. The configuration of the routing analysis as well as the hardware and software environment are shown as follows:

Configuration of routing analysis:

Network dataset: StreetMap Premium in North America 2021 R3 on a LOCAL DISK

Mode: Driving time

Stops: 6 points for 3 routes (each route has 2 points as origin and destination)

Polygon barrier: for testing purpose, I used county boundaries in North Carolina (a total of 100 counties) - a scaled cost is set for each polygon.

Hardware and software Environment:

CPU: i7-7700@3.6GHz(8 CPUs)

Memory: 16 GB

Operation System: Windows 10

ArcGIS version: ArcGIS Pro 2.9.2

I documented the time cost for each step as follows for your reference:

Loading Stops: 29 seconds

Loading Polygon Barriers: 44 minutes 48 seconds

Solving: 9 minutes 6 seconds

Total: 54 minutes 23 seconds

You can see the time it took for loading Polygon Barriers is incredible long.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

With many thanks and best wishes,
Tianyang

JaySandhu · Accepted Answer

Loading large polygon barriers will take time. Basically for each polygon it has to find all the streets that fall in it and then keep the scaled costs for the attributes. With a 100 counties that is a lot of streets. And most likely the Streetmap data is a compressed file geodatabase that takes longer to locate on. However once you have loaded these polygons, you can reuse them again and it will be quicker. You can load them into a new analysis layer and when loading them from the previous layer choose Use Network Location fields as opposed to the default option of Use Geometry.

You can also pre-compute the locations using the Calculate Location fields and then load them with network location fields.

This method will work as long as you do not change/edit/rebuild the underlying network.

Jay Sandhu

JaySandhu · Accepted Answer

To provide near real time routing the best option would be to incorporate the slow downs into the network dataset. This means you should have an editable network dataset where you can add a new travel time attribute where you can update the slowdowns and then add a new travel mode for weather routing to make it easy to use. This required rebuilding the network after you make changes to the travel attribute.

The other option is to pre-compute locations of the hurricane or weather affected roads (by Calculate Locations) and use them as the part of the service. This means you will need to re-compute the location fields when the weather polygon changes.

Jay Sandhu