How to Randomly Shift Oil Discovery Locations within 10-20km in ArcGIS Pro

Question

Hello everyone,

I have a shapefile of oil discovery locations, and I need to randomly displace each location by a distance between 10 and 20 kilometers. I am looking to perform this task multiple times for analysis purposes.

Could someone please guide me on how to achieve this in ArcGIS Pro? Any detailed steps or scripts that could help automate this process for a large number of iterations would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Hornbydd · Answer

What @MervynLotter suggest is a good solution but I just want to add that you could have also used the Create Random Points tool and set the constraining feature class to the buffers.

BobBooth1 · Answer

Also, once you have the coordinate values in the attribute table, you can use the Calculate Field tool to adjust them other ways than rounding, for example by adding some random positive or negative value within some specific range of values to each feature's x and y coordinates.

I'd go with Python calculations for this, see:

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/data-management/calculate-field-examples.htm

BobBooth1 · Answer

Another approach would be to round the coordinates of the points:

https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/de-identify-health-data-for-visualization-and-sharing/#generalize-and-aggregate-data:~:text=You%20will%20use-,coordinate%20rounding,-to%20accomplish%20this