Jan Husdal

Book Review: Transportation GIS

This book showcases many examples of how GIS can be applied in the field of transportation using ArcView GIS, but it doesn't come with any theory. As such, Transportation GIS more like an overpriced sales brochure and not a textbook. Nevertheless, the examples are really neat and should inspire any practitioner in the field.

Book review: Geographic Information Systems for Transportation

Having been a student with Harvey Miller probably makes my review somewhat biased. Nevertheless, Geographic Information Systems for Transportation: Principles and Applications (Spatial Information Systems) is an excellent book if you're a student or professional in the field of GIS and need to know how GIS can be applied in transportation, or vice versa, knowing transportation, this book will tell you what GIS can do for you. Mind you, this is not for the fainthearted, this is solid academic work and presumes some academic knowlegde prior to reading this book. It is specked with references that are hard to get, and you are likely to spend more time in the library reading up on the bibliography than digesting the actual text. Still, if GIS-T is your line of research, you cannot avoid having this book. It is by far one of the most comprehensive I have seen. It is clear that the authors posess solid knowledge and have covered a wide field and left nothing out. It may have a rather inhibitive price; in hindsight it was well worth the money spent.

ArcView Network Analyst Tutorial

The ArcView Network Analyst (AVNA) extension module allows the user to solve 3 categories of network analysis problems; Find Best Route, Find Closest Facility and Find Service Area. I

Find Best Route problems involve finding the "least cost impedance" path on the network between two or more stops. Find Closest Facility pertains to finding the distances from an event to the nearest facilities, or vice versa, finding the distance from a facility to one or more events. Find Service Area determines the area that a particular facility can serve within a given time or cost frame.

This tutorial was developed by husdal.com at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 2000-2002. It shows how to solve 3 categories of network analysis problems; Find Best Route, Find Closest Facility and Find Service Area, and it comes complete with exercise data and solutions.

Click here for the tutorial

Corridor Analysis - A timeline of evolutionary development

Locating a right-of-way for a linear facility such as a pipeline, a transmission line, a railway or a roadway can be a complex problem. Locating a corridor connecting an origin and a destination on a landscape is analogous to identifying a route that traverses a continuous landscape. Thus, corridor analysis is closely linked to shortest-path finding and network analysis in raster GIS, and has evolved along with it. Corridor analysis is essentially a variant of surface analysis, but can also be viewed as a site selection problem where an optimal contiguous and elongated site is sought.

Keywords: corridor analysis, network analysis, raster GIS, least-cost path

Road Transportation Management using GIS - vehicle routing and tracking

Roads are main arteries of modern society’s infrastructure, contributing heavily to the distribution of goods and persons. GIS provides many helpful applications for ensuring a smooth flow, by aiding design, routing, traffic control and real-time navigation. In essence, a GIS application in transportation is maybe no longer a GIS, but a merger of GIS with Intelligent Transportation Systems or Transport Telematics, where GIS no longer exists as a stand-alone product.