Creating a "Drive Zone" Polygon

[JacquelynPutnam]

Hi All,

I recently performed ArcGIS Location Allocation for a layer of census population data and a layer of facility destinations. Before this, I discerned the service area of these destinations with Create Service Area. Service Area however does not consider the capacity of the facility in the way the Location Allocation did; therefore, the service areas really aren't super accurate. Now that I know to where each demand point is allocated, I would like to create a say "drive zone" polygon around the facility based on its true demand. I can't however figure out how to do so. I do not necessarily need these polygons to have any detailed information associated with them, I just need to compare what Create Service Area polygons look like against this more realistic service area. I have ArcGIS 10.3 to work with.

Any insight is appreciated!

Jacquelyn

[ChrisDonohue__GISP]

Adding Melinda Morang here (ESRI Network Analyst Expert) in case the system doesn't automatically forward it to her.  She may have some ideas.

Chris Donohue, GISP

[JaySandhu · Accepted solution]

It is not clear what you are trying to achieve. Service area or drive time polygons have a constraint of how far out to go on the road network. They do not consider any other factor.

Location-Allocation on the other hand allocates demand point to a facility and can consider capacity. There are no tools to create "polygons" around a facility to encompass the allocated demand.

Perhaps you can look at each facility, find the distance to the furthest allocated demand point and use that as the break value for that facility in the service area. So each facility will have a different break value. Next set the polygon generation options to "Not Overlapping" and solve. This may give you an answer closer to your "drive zone polygons" if I think I understood what you are trying to do.

Jay Sandhu