An overview of the Server toolset

The Server toolset contains tools that are designed to perform two types of tasks:

• Set up web services for solving network analyses.
• Retrieve live traffic and traffic-incident data from web services so that you can use real-time traffic conditions for visualization and network analysis purposes.

Tools in the Server toolset

Tool	Description
Find Closest Facilities	Finds one or more facilities closest to an incident based on travel time, distance, or other cost and outputs the best route, chosen facility, and driving directions between the incident and the facility. For example, you can use this tool to find the closest hospital to an accident, the closest police cars to a crime scene, or the closest store to a customer's address.
Find Routes	Finding a route analysis can mean determining the quickest or shortest way to travel between locations. You might want to use this tool to generate driving directions to visit multiple stops or to measure the distance or travel time between locations. The tool is capable of finding routes for one or more vehicles each time it runs, so you can determine the best routes for several drivers to visit preassigned stops, for instance, or measure in a single solve the distance of home-to-work trips for many commuters.
Generate Origin Destination Cost Matrix	Creates an origin-destination (OD) cost matrix from multiple origins to multiple destinations. An OD cost matrix is a table that contains the travel time and travel distance from each origin to each destination. Additionally, it ranks the destinations that each origin connects to in ascending order based on the minimum time or distance required to travel from that origin to each destination. The best path on the street network is discovered for each origin-destination pair, and the travel times and travel distances are stored as attributes of the output lines. Even though the lines are straight for performance reasons, they always store the travel time and travel distance along the street network, not straight-line distance.
Generate Service Areas	Creates a service area network analysis layer, sets the analysis properties, and solves the analysis. This tool is ideal for setting up a service area geoprocessing service on the web. A network service area is a region that encompasses all streets that can be accessed within a given distance or travel time from one or more facilities.
Solve Location-Allocation	The Solve Location-Allocation tool chooses the best locations from a set of input locations.
Solve Vehicle Routing Problem	Creates a vehicle routing problem (VRP) network analysis layer, sets the analysis properties, and solves the analysis, which is ideal for setting up a VRP web service. A vehicle routing problem analysis layer finds the best routes for a fleet of vehicles.
Update Traffic Data	Downloads live traffic data from a web service and stores it in a dynamic traffic format (DTF) file, which is a file that network datasets can read for live-traffic analysis and display.
Update Traffic Incidents	Creates a point feature class containing live traffic-incident data from a web service. Traffic incidents include events such as accidents and road construction.