Latest Contributions by JaySandhu

"The network dataset has no edge elements. It may be unbuilt." As the message says, the problem is with the network dataset and not with the route layer. If the network has no edges perhaps it needs to be "built". Also if it has no edges then the stops you loaded have no where to snap to and will need to be re-loaded or their locations re-calculated once the edges are there. You mention that you created and build the network. When you add the network dataset to ArcMap, say NO to adding the source features. Now, does anything draw? Or if you bring up the properties of the network dataset, what does it say on it's status? Jay Sandhu ... View more

VRP solver should assign all orders. If they are not being assigned then look at the reason why. That is, could the capacity of the trucks or number of orders or maximum work day hours, etc have been exceeded. So look at the reason and change the constraints accordingly. Do note that VRP is designed to lower your overall cost withing the specified constraints. Jay Sandhu ... View more

Glad it worked. The model in the 3D network tutorial is meant for use in ArcScene where you can visualize the 3d lines but cannot directly add a network dataset and solve on it. Jay Sandhu ... View more

In workstation ARC/INFO, the polygons were treated as points (at their centroids) and straight line distances were used to compute the distances between them. At the time these options were implemented, street data was not very common. In ArcGIS 10, you can use Feature To Point GP tool to turn polygons to points (which workstation did behind the scenes) and then you will have to use a street network dataset to help compute the distances. Nowadays street data is available for most places and provides better results then simply straight line distances. Regards, Jay Sandhu ... View more

ArcMap is a 2-D app. If you click on the screen to add "Stops" on a 3D network dataset most likely it will not "locate" these stops on any edge. If you have 3D locations that you want to use as Stops, put them in a point feature class and then use the GP tool CalculateLocations on it. Now you can Load Locations these 3d point features using the pre-computed Network Locations (not geometry) into a Stop layer and solve. Jay Sandhu ... View more

Last week was Esri User Conf so missed seeing your question. Since you are siting electric charging facility, rather than putting a capacity constraint, put a distance or travel time constraint. So choose the "Minimize Facilities" problem type and set a travel time constraint of 60 minutes and solve. Adjust as needed. Hint: Take into account how far the vehicles can travel on one charge. Once you know what is the minimum set of facilities needed you can switch to maximize coverage and pick your expansion strategy of 50, 100, etc until you serve everyone. Jay Sandhu ... View more

VRP is designed to route a few thousand orders for delivery tomorrow or over a certain horizon. What I am reading into your application is that it is a high density meter reading problem. Traditionally this is solved using the Chinese Postman Problem Solver not the Vehicle Routing Problem Solver as the goal is to visit EACH edge of the network. Since we do not provide a Chinese Postman Problem solver it is not feasible to solve it with VRP as is. So you can either aggregate the data or reduce the data by making regions in your data to solve at a time. One way to aggregate the data is to take any edge with multiple stops and reduce it to one or two stops on that edge. For example if one edge had 20 houses, then use the GP tool FeatureToPoint and it will place one point at the midpoint of the selected edges. Now you can load that point into the VRP order layer with curb property set to No U-Turn. That way when VRP solves it will have visited each edge and you can post-process the data with your original locations to get the best sequence to visit. (Hint: output routes have measures for linear referencing, so use a GP tool Locate Features Along Route to get the sequence) If the above does not work for you then I suggesst you take a look at one of our business partners that provides a solution to meter reading: RouteSmart.com Regards, Jay Sandhu ... View more

There can be a few things to watch out for. Number one is where is the network dataset located? Is it on a local hard disk? Network solves are data intensive and the access to the data will dictate how fast the shortest paths will be computed. Also, I assume you have the Hierarchy ON. As far as CPU being 25 percent, is it a quad core machine? If one core is 100% busy it will show up as 25% overall. ArcMap solves use one core only. Jay Sandhu ... View more

You can open the routes attribute table and use the Field Calculator to make up some expression like: "Cycle_" & [ObjectID] to get unique names. You can add more vb script there to make more compliated expressions. BTW, the scale of your problem suggests to me that you are trying to some sort of "meter reading". VRP is not designed for such applications. But you can give it a try by making sure that when you load in the service order points have their curb approach property set to "No_U-turn" and set the solver properties to make U-Turns only at dead ends. Even then, you will have to partition the number of service orders into some smaller set as you will run out of memory when the VRP solver starts by by computing a matrix of travel times between all orders before it can start to optimize the route sequence. Jay Sandhu ... View more

If you are trying to do 5000 service areas of 1 hour each at the same time, then it will run out of memory trying to keep them all in memory. I suggest using the following workaround to use chunking: http://support.esri.com/en/knowledgebase/techarticles/detail/38426 Regards, Jay Sandhu ... View more

How are you placing the stops? Are you clicking on the map? Note that ArcMap is a 2-d application and can only return 2-d points. if that is your work flow, I would suggest that you create 3-d points and use Load Locations to load them and they should snap on to the correct locations. Jay Sandhu ... View more

Location-Allocation does not yet support capacity. But you can solve for 4 sites. I am not sure why you are getting only two? Perhaps you choose minimize facilities and not minimize impedance. Spread out the candidates where the school can be built then choose a minimize impedance and put an impedance cutoff to a reasonable distance for how far the school will take students from. Then see how the students are allocated to each school. Again, this will not give you the perfect solution as it is not guranteed to take only 400 students but should generate your alternatives to where to best put them based on other constraints. You can choose a set of 4 reasonable locations and then run them through the Optimum Allocation tools: http://resources.arcgis.com/gallery/file/Geoprocessing-Model-and-Script-Tool-Gallery/details?entryID=C4E79AE3-1422-2418-88B2-008CC5F9D24F Jay Sandhu ... View more

You can not build a geomeric and network dataset at the same time. So you could make a copy of the streets in a new feature dataset (in file gdb) and then right-click the feature dataset and make a network dataset. I would suggest that you run through the first set of tutorials that go about making a network dataset. Jay Sandhu ... View more

Do you have or have you built your network dataset to do your routing on? From your post: I don't think I am building my network correctly. What I did was select both of my shape files for the network in new->network in ArcCatalogue. But this didn't seem to be what I thought it would be because there was nothing for me to select in the make closest facility layer field. You need to be in ArcMap, add your network dataset then from the NA toolbar create the CF layer and then you can load your locations as facilities and incidents. If you have never done this then I would suggest trying out the NA tutorial: http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//00470000005r000000.htm Jay Sandhu ... View more