How can I connect buildings to street networks?

[NoraEderer]

Hi everyone,

I'm working on food poverty in rural Germany and got stuck. I want to look at all the residential houses of a municipality area and find out where the closest supermarket is located. If one cannot reach it by a 15 minutes walk, I will expect that the local supply is not assured.

So far, I have created a network dataset with all the roads, bikeways and junctions of the municipality area. However, I cannot run the Closest Facility Analysis. I guess, this is because I have not connected the building / supermarket coordinates to the network data set - but I don't know how to do this. Can someone help me out?

Cheers,

Nora

[MelindaMorang · Accepted solution]

Hello, Nora.  The houses and supermarkets should not be included as part of your network dataset.  Instead, when you do a Closest Facility analysis, they will be added to the Closest Facility layer as "Incidents" and "Facilities".  The network dataset just models the transportation network itself, whereas the network analysis layer which references the network dataset can be set up to solve many different types of problems.  This way you can re-use the network for many different things.  It is not specific to answering one question.

Here are some tutorials for the Closest Facility solver:

- ArcMap: Exercise 4: Finding the closest fire stations—Help | ArcGIS Desktop 

- ArcGIS Pro: Tutorial: Closest facility—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop 

[NoraEderer]

Hi Melinda,

It worked! Thank you so much!