Dear Melinda,
I have defined now the wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) required as well as which demand points are allocated to each of them (please see the image attached as an example). As long as I am using this tool to define a sewerage network, I can see the distance of each pipeline from each demand point to the WWTP in the atribute table of the lines of the Location Allocation or the Closest Facility layer. However I found the following issues or doubts:
1.Once the pipelines (which I assume are the roads in my ArcGIS project) of two or more demand points converge, the volume of water will increase, meaning that the diameter of the pipeline might increase as well, and I need to know the exact lenght of every section from the demand point to each of the convergences until reaching the WWTP. Is there a way to find these lenghts of the sections, additional to the total distance from the demand point to the WWTP?
2. Right now, in the atribute table of the lines I get the total lenght from each demand point to the WWTP. However, if I sum them up I will be counting more than once some of the lenghts because the routes from different demand points have common paths. Do you know how can I avoid these issue? This is required because at the end I need to make a cost analysis and this is based strongly on the length of the pipelines.
3. And the last question, just to confirm if I understand properly. The location allocation solver, type of problem Minimize Weighted Impedance (P-Median), chooses the best location considering both the length of the road as well as the weigh of each demand point? I ask because I need the WWTP to be located in the closest place to all the demand points but also considering the population of each town, because the higher the population, the bigger he amount of wastewater produced and therefore, I would not like to transport a huge amoun of water but to locate the WWTP as close as possible to big towns.
Thank you so much and I hope I explained myself properly.
Best regars,
Sara Ramos