Site selection tool development with Modelbuilder

1. Site selection tool development with Modelbuilder CE697 Bert Meeus

2. Selection criteria: • price of house • # bedrooms • # bathrooms • size of house • distance to: • nearest grocery store • nearest fire station • nearest major road • Purdue • school of kids

3. How to deal with selection criteria? • minimum or maximum value or distance for each of the criteria • calculation of suitability value for most of the criteria Houses that have a too small/large value or distance are dropped The higher this value, the better

4. Minimum or maximum distance • near: calculates distance between every house and the nearest feature • select: selects houses that have a distance larger or smaller than a specified distance

5. Minimum or maximum value • select: selects houses that have a value smaller or larger than a specified value (‘near’ tool is not needed)

6. Calculation of suitability value • add field: adds field to attribute table • calculate field: calculates suitability value for criterium • at the end of program: all suitability values for each criterium are summed to compute a total suitability value

7. Calculation of suitability value Formula used to calculate suitability value for grocery store: with:

8. Calculation of suitability value Formulas used to calculate the other suitability values:

9. Results: With default values: 3 houses are more or less suitable

10. Results: With default values: 3 houses are more or less suitable upper right house has highest suitability value

11. Modelbuilder problems: • Running the program only works when opening the model editor and then selecting ‘run entire model’. When using ‘open’ to run the program, the newly created feature classes will not be stored. • The output feature classes of the tool ‘select’ does not want to use relative path names (although this option is checked!)  every output class needs to be manually replaced with the right full path name every time the geodatabase is moved to another location. ‘Select’ is used 8 times, to 8 replacements need to be done before running the program. • When trying to run the program a second time, the input layer ‘house’ needs to be replaced by a copy of ‘house_backup’, because the ‘add field’ tool only works when the field name does not exist yet (it can not rewrite a field).