school enrollment boundaries

[DavidDude]

I'm working on a problem involving optimal school enrollment boundaries. I'd like to draw boundaries such that the students are evenly divided amongst the schools, based on the capacity of each school (assume more capacity than students), minimizing the distances between student homes and schools. I think this is a location-allocation problem, but I can't get that to work. I tried loading the schools as faciliites and the student homes as demand points. Can anyone point me in the direction of resources for a problem like this?

I am new to this forum, and a novice to intermediate user of ArcMap, so please forgive me if I should be handling this a different way. I am open to suggestions! 😉

Thanks,
David

[JaySandhu]

If you have ArcGIS 10.1, then use location-allocation with the Maximize Capacitated Coverage problem type.

If you have a previous version, then location-allocation did not have a way to honor capacity of your facilities. In that case you use the following tools to solve the school allocation problem:

http://resources.arcgis.com/gallery/file/geoprocessing/details?entryID=C4E79AE3-1422-2418-88B2-008CC...

Jay Sandhu

[DavidDude]

Thank you! I just upgraded to 10.1 so I am trying that now. We have almost 13,000 students, so it is taking forever to load the demand points. I hope I'm doing it right! 😉 I'll let you know how it goes.

-David

[JaySandhu]

Just loading 13,000 demand points should not be slow. Are you using a shape file based network dataset? Perhaps you may need to create a spatial index on the input streets feature class (or in the file gdb).

Also note that if you do not have a meaningful distance cutoff, it will try to create a 13,000 by 13,000 od cost matrix to solve the location-allocation and may run out of memory unless you are using 10.1 on a 64 bit OS machine with at least 4 GB or RAM.

Jay Sandhu