topic Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points? in Data Management Questions

How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoseBarrios2 — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 18:11:42 GMT

Need help on how to calculate distance of multiple points. I have two layers : an input feature(office) and near feature ( projects). I want to know the distance of the projects for each office. The near tool won't work (It calculate the distance to all points) unless I run the tool for each office...any ideas?

Thanks,

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JayantaPoddar — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 18:32:19 GMT

Near Tool

Calculates distance and additional proximity information between the input features and the closest feature in another layer or feature class.

Point Distance

Determines the distances from input point features to all points in the near features within a specified search radius (you could keep it empty).

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoseBarrios2 — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 18:56:05 GMT

The near tool and point distance calculate the distance to ALLL point (projects) and I need to calculate the distance to the points that belong to each office. The only way around is exporting the projects that belong to each office ant run the near tool for each set of projects...I have 120 offices and 5000 projects ...

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

AbdullahAnter — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 19:59:25 GMT

Could I ask you What was the layer that you set as Input features and what was the Near Features in the tool?

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

DanPatterson_Retired — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 20:12:54 GMT

This can be done but the ease at which it can be done depends on the format of your data.

Are all the locations in the same file? ie the origins and their associated destinations or are they in separate files.

or are the origins in one file and all the destinations in another file which has a key to associate each destination with one origin?

Are all the files in a projected coordinate system?

Do they cover great distances (ie 10's, 100's 1000's of kilometers)

Any substantive information on the existing data structures and input coordinate systems would be helpful.

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoseBarrios2 — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 20:18:20 GMT

My INPUT is office location (point) and my NEAR is projects locations (point). Some offices are very close on location and some offices travel very far for projects so I can not use the search radius. For every office there is a set of projects and I want to know the max, min and average distance of those projects!

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

ChrisDonohue__GISP — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 20:18:51 GMT

Another option is Generate Near Table—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop

I guess a big question going forward with this is the sorting down of the results to just the applicable projects for each office, as many of the possible solutions (Pointdistance, Generate Near Table) would provide output of all the Offices to all the Projects, generating one large table, which would be unwieldy.

Is there currently in your data field(s) that identify information on which Projects belong to which Offices? If that relationship mechanism could be identified, it may be very possible to generate the desired output so it is limited to just the projects for each office; however, we would need to know how that is structured so as to come up with an effective solution. Possibilities include employing Modelbuilder or Python as part of the data processing. For example, one could loop through each office and only find the distance the projects associated with that office. Again, it would be dependent on how the data is structured.

What is ModelBuilder?—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop

Chris Donohue, GISP

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoseBarrios2 — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 20:24:06 GMT

I have two data sets (.shp) and a common key field ID ( with one - to many). Yes, both files are on the same projection (USA_Contiguous_Equidistant_Conic) and YES they cover very large distance (more than 100 miles)

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

DanPatterson_Retired — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 20:26:07 GMT

Jose... I was also questioning whether the data were all in one file, two files (ie origins in one and projects in another) or more (origins in one file and each project in another)

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoseBarrios2 — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 20:29:38 GMT

YES. I have a common field that identify each office and link to projects. My Phython skills are very limited

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoseBarrios2 — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 20:33:46 GMT

Hi Dan,

I have two data sets (.shp) and a common key field ID ( with one - to many). There are about 400 project for each office. Both layers are on the same projection (USA_Contiguous_Equidistant_Conic) and the offices cover very large distance (more than 100 miles) lots of over-lapping. Basically I am covering the entire southeast of US and the Caribbean.

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

DanPatterson_Retired — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 20:52:36 GMT

I think the biggest problem is to how to dissect what you have.... one to many relationship... within a loop. The distance calculations are trivial. I will look around to see if someone already has a solution to this portion of the problem

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoshuaBixby — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 00:53:29 GMT

No better time to learn Python than the present. There is no pre-built tool that will accomplish what you are after, but what you are after should be fairly straightforward to script. If you could provide some more specifics about your data files, GeoNet users could likely give specific examples to try.

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoseBarrios2 — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 11:17:10 GMT

Hello Joshua,

You are correct. It is a great tool and I am learning Python but it may take a while before I am capable of compiling a tool that can do all what I need. Here is how my data look like: I have two shp. layers (both points). One layer is for the office with two fields - office_Name and orgCode (total 128 records); The other layer contain the projects (7000 records) with 4 fields: Project_Name,.. Project_ID, ...Project_Type and the common field key "orgCode" that identify the office. The projects cover the entire southeast of US and the Caribbean. Some offices are very close and some very far and there is no search radius or boundary that I can use to limit the distance for targeting the features.

Basically my Input feature is the Office layer and my near feature is the Projects. I am trying to write a simple script that do what I am doing manually:

1. select the office record by orgCode

2. find the common key on "projects" table and select the records

3. run the point distance tool on selected records

4. select the distance field and run the summary for min, max and mean distance

5. save the table with the stat.

6. look for next office record and repeat the process

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoshuaBixby — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 14:10:47 GMT

Your data set isn't that large. I would go with: 1) Generate Near Table—Help | ArcGIS Desktop, 2) join each shape file/layer to the new table based on the unique identifiers (not orgCode), 3) select all records where orgCode from the 2 layers don't match, 4) delete selected records to get only distances for projects from relevant office.

I suspect the Generate Near Table will complete in seconds for a data set of this size. If the data set were extremely large, it might make sense to optimize the workflow to work on subsets of data, but that would be overkill in this case.

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoseBarrios2 — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 14:56:39 GMT

I'm not clear what do you men by running the near table tool. If I do that, it would create 896,000 records...it basically measure the distance of the 7000 records to each office. On not clear how I will join the tables!!

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

ChrisDonohue__GISP — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 15:08:40 GMT

What Joshua Bixby proposed is the probably the easiest way to do this.

As an alternative, if you are comfortable with Modelbuilder, here's a model that would probably work after some modification to the specifics of your data. As a preliminary step, one would manually join the offices to your projects layer before running the model. Then the model selects each office from the office feature class and the projects with the same office and just runs a Pointdistance on each. Finally, the Pointdistance values are joined to each offices file, resulting in a feature class for each office with only the projects for that office and their distances.

This model worked with the test data I threw together. Note that you may also be able to skip the Copy Features function in the model. I added it as a way to check the intermediate data.

Chris Donohue, GISP

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

ChrisDonohue__GISP — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 15:26:45 GMT

It is not immediately obvious, but with Generate Near Table one joins the resultant table back to the original inputs based on the Object IDs in each respective file.

For example, the output table will have a field called INPUT_FID. This Joins to the OBJECTID in the feature class used as the Input Features when running the Generate Near Table tool.

The output table will also have a field called NEAR_FID. This Joins to the OBJECTID in the feature class used as the Near Features when running the tool.

Generate Near Table—Help | ArcGIS Desktop

(note - the header in this topic says ArcGIS Pro but the information is the same for ArcGIS Desktop)

Chris Donohue, GISP

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

JoseBarrios2 — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 13:06:20 GMT

Hello Chris,

Thanks a lot for your help..I would give it a try.! I am on desktop 10.4 butt I forgot to ask if Pro may have this capability.?

Thanks,

Re: How to calculate distance of multiple points?

DanPatterson_Retired — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 13:19:41 GMT

The toolboxes are essentially identical... Generate Near Table in Pro