Available with Network Analyst license.
With the ArcGIS Network Analyst extension, you can answer questions like the following:
- What is the quickest way to get from point A to point B?
- Which houses are within five minutes of a fire station?
- What market areas does a business cover?
- A person wants to visit a store. Which branch should the potential customer visit to minimize travel time?
- Which ambulances or patrol cars can respond quickest to an incident?
- How can a fleet of delivery or service vehicles improve customer service and minimize transportation costs?
- Where can a business open a store to maximize market share?
- If a company has to downsize, which stores should it close to maintain the most overall demand?
- What are live or historical traffic conditions like, and how do they affect my network analysis results?
Businesses, public services, and other organizations benefit from the ArcGIS Network Analyst extension because it helps them run their operations more efficiently and make better strategic decisions. These organizations can better understand dynamic markets, both current and potential, once they know who can access their goods or services. Transportation costs can be reduced by optimally sequencing stops and finding the shortest paths between the stops while considering several constraints such as time windows, vehicle capacities, and maximum travel times. Customer service can be improved through quicker response times or more convenient facility locations. The ArcGIS Network Analyst extension facilitates understanding and solving problems of this nature.
Researchers and analysts commonly benefit from the extension's ability to determine the least-cost network paths between several origins and destinations. The origin-destination cost matrices that the ArcGIS Network Analyst extension creates often become input for larger analyses. For instance, predicting travel behavior frequently incorporates the distances people would need to travel to reach certain attractions. These network distances are applied in mathematical expressions to help make trip forecasts.
Similarly, some analyses in spatial statistics provide more accurate results when network distances are used in place of straight-line distances. Consider as an example traffic-incident analysis, which has the aim of locating clusters of traffic accidents, pinpointing their causes, and taking action to reduce the number of accidents. Since cars travel on roads, determining clusters of car accidents with network distances is far more effective than using straight-line distances.
Before you can perform network analyses to answer questions like those listed above, you need a network dataset, which models a transportation network.
What is a network?
A network is a system of interconnected elements, such as edges (lines) and connecting junctions (points), that represent possible routes from one location to another.
People, resources, and goods tend to travel along networks: cars and trucks travel on roads, airliners fly on predetermined flight paths, oil flows in pipelines. By modeling potential travel paths with a network, it is possible to perform analyses related to the movement of the oil, trucks, or other agents on the network. The most common network analysis is finding the shortest path between two points.
ArcGIS groups networks into two categories: geometric networks and network datasets.
Geometric networks (utility and river networks)
River networks and utility networks—like electrical, gas, sewer, and water lines—allow travel on edges in only one direction at a time. The agent in the network—for instance, the oil flowing in a pipeline—can't choose which direction to travel; rather, the path it takes is determined by external forces: gravity, electromagnetism, water pressure, and so on. An engineer can control the flow of the agent by controlling how external forces act on the agent.
Network datasets (transportation networks)
Transportation networks—like street, pedestrian, and railroad networks—can allow travel on edges in both directions. The agent on the network—for instance, a truck driver traveling on roads—is generally free to decide the direction of traversal as well as the destination.
Multimodal network datasets
A network dataset is capable of modeling a single mode of transportation, like roads, or a multimodal network made up of several transportation modes like roads, railroads, and waterways.
3D network datasets
Three-dimensional network datasets enable you to model the interior pathways of buildings, mines, caves, and so on.
If you have street features with accurate z-coordinate values, you can use them with z-aware features that model pathways inside buildings to create 3D networks of campuses or even cities. This allows you to answer questions like the following:
- What is the best wheelchair-accessible route between rooms in different buildings?
- What floors of a high-rise building can't be reached by a fire department within eight minutes?