using Polygons in a network analysis

[Elia]

Hello everyone. I am writing my bachelor's thesis on a heat protection concept in Frankfurt am Main. It is called "Cool Places" (Kühle-Orte). I want to conduct a network analysis to see how long it takes to reach the respective locations. Creating the network dataset with all my paths worked. Now comes the difficult part: the city's heat protection concept includes almost 200 locations, many of which are forests. They are very large, and if I only represent them as points, I won't find out the actual accessibility of these forests. Is it possible to use polygons instead of points in the network analysis? If so, how? I would like ArcGIS to work with the outer edge of the polygons and calculate the distance to it.

I downloaded all 200 locations and I also have the polygons that I need. But how do I connect them so that I can use the polygons in the network analysis too?

[JaySandhu · Accepted solution]

Network Analyst does not use polygons as inputs as it can only route on street segments. So you have to represent the polygon by one or more points. Are there roads inside the forested areas/polygons? You can generate points on these roads instead of having just one centroid to represent the polygon. You can also use the polygon to intersect the roads and see where there are points on the border to help with the distance calculation.

Jay Sandhu

[Elia]

thanks mate. I strgC strgV so many points into the polygons so that they stand as an proper place holder. The Problem was that i had to fill the inner space of the polygons, so it was not enough to just put points on the outer lines of the polygon. As mentioned, it was a lot of strgC and strgV this day haha but it worked well.

greetings elia

[JaySandhu]

Glad you found a way to solve your problem. There are a couple of tools that can help create points inside polygons. First, you can use the Polygon to Raster with an appropriate cell size to create an output grid/raster. Then you can use the Raster To Point to convert these into points. These will be spread evenly within your polygon area. You can also choose to use the Create Random Points to sub select a random set from your raster points. Also, the Feature To Point tool can be used to place points on the mid points of selected roads. Hope all these tools will be useful in simplifying point creation!

Jay Sandhu