Location of facilities

[FedericoCasablanca]

I have a problem with the location of new facilities. In the specific I should locate rubbish bins in the city, without considering the current location (it is not relevant because all current and new bins have to be relocate), in 2 scenarios:

- considering only the coverage of the area.

- considering the coverage of the area and the capacity of the bins.

I have tried to use the funcion location/allocation, without any results because it is no possible to have proposed locations since I am looking for the best location of the bins.

I am doing this because after the pourpose is to study the optimal route of the camion for the two models, and state which one is better.

Can you give me some advices and ideas on how to solve this problem?

[JaySandhu]

Location-Allocation chooses the best site. But you have to give it something to work with. If you have "nothing", meaning it can be anywhere, then you can give it all possible places in your area. Since this function works with locations on the street network, you can place a point on every street and use that as a candidate location. To do this, use the geoprocessing tool Feature To Point. Make sure to check the Inside option to get the mid-point. Generally this can generate a lot of input points to consider. If you are only locating a few, then it should be ok. But generally I thin out the input points by randomly selecting points, say 1000, that are at least 200 meters apart.This should give you a very reasonable set of points to work with. You can use the geoprocessing tool Create Random Points.

You can get more information on these tools here:

Feature To Point—Data Management toolbox | ArcGIS Desktop 

Create Random Points—Data Management toolbox | ArcGIS Desktop 

Jay Sandhu