An overview of the Network Analysis toolset

The Network Analysis toolset contains tools that allow you to perform analyses on street networks, such as finding the best route across a city, finding the closest emergency vehicle or facility, identifying a service area around a location, or servicing a set of orders with a fleet of vehicles.

ToolDescription

Find Closest Facilities

Finds one or more facilities that are closest from an incident based on travel time or travel distance and outputs the best routes, driving directions between the incidents and the chosen facilities, and a copy of the chosen facilities. You can use the tool, for example, 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

Determines the shortest paths to visit the input stops and returns the driving directions, information about the visited stops, and the route paths, including travel time and distance.

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 store the travel time and travel distance along the street network, not straight-line distance.

Generate Service Areas

Determines network service areas around facilities. 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. For instance, the 10-minute service area for a facility includes all the streets that can be reached within 10 minutes from that facility.

Solve Location Allocation

Identifies the best location or locations from a set of input locations by assigning demand points to input facilities in a way that allocates the most demand to facilities and minimizes overall travel.

Solve Vehicle Routing Problem

Solves a vehicle routing problem (VRP) to find the best routes for a fleet of vehicles.

Tools in the Network Analysis toolset