topic Re: Closest Facility: Polygons as locations? in ArcGIS Network Analyst Questions

Closest Facility: Polygons as locations?

TheresaGarske — Thu, 12 May 2011 12:28:00 GMT

Hi!

My question straight forward is: Is it possible to load polygons as locations within the NA?

The story behind is the following: I am trying to calculate the shortest routes connecting building blocks and green spaces. Doing that I don't have any data concerning entrances available.

Since I realized that the NA works only with point-shapes, I created through "Feature to point" the center point for each polygon. But in the network analysis this ends up in disproportionate distances between a green space and a building block, because the NA looks for that point on the street network arouund e.g. the building block, where the distance to the center point and the street is the shortest.

To keep me from thinking about possibilities with eucledean distance, severeal network analysis steps etc., it would be very easy to just use polygons as locations and have the routes being calculated to any point of the polygon.

I hope the problem is understandable and I would definitely appreciate any help...

Thanks, Theresa

Re: Closest Facility: Polygons as locations?

DougSterling — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:03:29 GMT

One possibility is to:

Take your green space polygon and buffer it by say 10 meters

Intersect the buffered polygon with your streets to find the streets that intersect the buffer

Use the "Feature Vertices To Points" GP tool to turn the intersected street features in to individual points

Create a new closest facility layer (which by default goes from incidents to facilities)

Load the vertices as your facilities

Load your buildings as incidents

Solve to find the nearest park for each building (incident)

Hope this helps.

Re: Closest Facility: Polygons as locations?

TheresaGarske — Fri, 13 May 2011 11:14:20 GMT

Hello dsterling,

and thanks a lot for your help.
I will try this approach, the only problem I see than: If I take those intersects as green space "entrances", NA will calculate the routes from every building block to every green space "entrance" (intersect with streets). Which means, if a greenspace has more than one "entrance" I will have several routes... I hope you know what I mean.

Theresa

Re: Closest Facility: Polygons as locations?

TheresaGarske — Sun, 22 May 2011 18:32:55 GMT

anybody having any other idea?

Re: Closest Facility: Polygons as locations?

vijaybadugu — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 13:06:57 GMT

Try to calculate centroid points on fly or predefined layer.