SELECTING FACILITIES INTERACTIVELY
Make the road theme active,
Network > Find Closest Facility
Arcview Network Analyst now adds a facility theme to your view and a similar dialog box as for Find Best Route appears.
Select facilities.shp from the Facilities drop-down list.
The number of facilities to find is the number of nearest facilities to the event that you wish to find. If you for example are looking for the nearest ATM to your current location and your facilities list contains 200 ATMs, you would probably only the nearest 5 or so.
The cutoff-cost is the distance/cost where you want the search to stop. This is as far as you want to travel in search for the facility. Select the Properties button if you want to change the cutoff-cost from the default distance units to your specific cost units, for example minutes. Leave this line empty or enter a value.
If you have a directional network, where the cost of travel differs depending on which direction you are traveling in along the arc, select Traveling to/from event as appropriate. For example, if the facilities are hospitals, and the events are accidents, you can then analyze whether it is faster to travel to a given hospital from the accident, or whether it is faster to travel from a different hospital to the accident scene. This may be the case if there are restricted turns and roads depending on which direction you are traveling in. If the cost of traveling is independent of the direction, either choice is valid.
Click the Add Location icon to add an event and click the view to place your event where you want it to be.
Click the Solve icon.
After solving, the dialog box now displays the distance/cost to the number of facilities that are within the search radius. Select a particular facility to see it highlighted in the view.
SELECTING EVENTS FROM AN EVENT THEME
In the dialog box above, select Load Events, select the events file events.shp that you have already loaded into your view, then select the desired event from the drop-down list. Click the Solve icon.
Tip: If you would like to know the distance from one or more facilities to all individual events, simply reverse the input: Enter events instead of the facilities, and enter facilities where the events should be.
