I have random point data (school locations) that I need to divide into ‘n’ polygons (regions) based on: their distance to a facility, their relative distance to each other, and an attribute of that demand point (school impedance value).
This is really a simple Location-Allocation problem with the ‘schools’ as demand points, and ‘Instructors’ as facility points. However, the built in ArcGIS location-Allocation impedance value is only based on either TIME or Distance. I want to base the impedance value on distance (or time) AS WELL AS on a “school impedance value” (a simple integer field of the Schools attribute table).
The purpose:
There are ‘n’ number of Instructors (facilities) that have to visit ‘n’ number of schools (demand points). I need to divide up these schools into regions (polygons). However, some schools take multiple days for the instructor to complete their task at that school (larger schools require more time to complete the task).
For example:
there are 300 schools and 3 instructors. Location Allocation tool would divide these up according to either: equal number of schools (100 schools/instructor) or lowest impedance value based on time/distance. But of those 300 schools 50 of them could take multiple days to teach and theoretically all 50 multi-day schools could be assigned to 1 instructor; thus making the teaching time uneven.
I do have some programming/scripting background if it is required.