Analysis electric network with pgRouting - gis

Electric network is a kind of utility network in GIS. In this network we have a point layer that consist power stations and end users. Power stations called source and end users called sink. And also we have one or more line layer that consist power lines. (in the simplest case).
The direction of this network is from sources to sinks
My question is how to use pgRouting to identify the direct of this network?
pgRouting has function called pgr_createTopology that builds a network topology based on the geometry information. When I call this function it fill source column and target column of my line layer. source and target show the direction of my network. But this direction is not based of source and sink.
In general can we define our own direction in specific network with pgRouting and not use its default direction?

As per my understanding of pgRouting, source and target values of a line are calculated using digitization direction of line.So if u want your direction to be from source to sink. Check the digitization direction of your line segment and where ever it incorrect or in the wrong direction, reverse the digitization direction using ArcMap or QGIS. And then run pgr_createTopology.

Related

Is there a reality capture parameter to request the desired number of vertices?

In the previous reality capture system users could set a parameter which would determine the resolution of the output models. I want to wind up with models about 100-150K vertices. Is there a setting that allows me to request the modeler to keep the number of generated vertices within some bounds, somewhere in the forge API?
The vertex/triangle decimation is usually, what can be called "subjective" task, which can also explain why there are so many optimization algorithms in the wild.
One type of optimization you would need and expect for "organic" models, and totally different one for an architectural building.
The Reality Capture API provides you only with raw Hi-Res results, avoiding "opionated" optimizations. This should be considered just as a step in automation pipeline.
Another step, would be, upon receiving, to automatically optimize the resulted mesh based on set of settings you need.
One of these steps could be Design Automation for 3ds Max, where you feed a model and using the ProOptimizer Modifier within 3ds Max, you output the mesh with needed detail. A sample of this step, can be found here: https://forge-showroom.autodesk.io/post/prooptimizer.
There are also numerous opensource solutions which should help you cover this post-processing step.

How to draw routes in tableau with line thickness indicating the cost incurred for that route?

I have transport/logistics data which I am trying to visualize using mapping capability of Tableau. I have data at route level i.e origin & destination combinations defined as city, country level for Europe & UK.I have information about cost & volume flow across different origin and destination points.
I know we can draw straight lines from one point to another if we have the lat-long data for each point. Referring to the link below
http://kb.tableausoftware.com/articles/knowledgebase/using-path-shelf-pattern-analysis
I have three questions:
1. Is there an easy way to get the zip codes and latitude-longitude data along with distance between all points in my data? I know SAS directory has the data for US zip codes but I am working for Europe & UK locations
How to change color or thickness of lines based on the cost incurred or volume transported on a particular route?
Can I draw actual road distance between two points? I mean not the straight displacement line but the route similar to how Google Map shows.
Please share your knowledge nuggets or experience around this.
Thanks,
Nisha

ArcGIS Server - compare routes

I've got a list of points, and a route that an external provider has generated through those points.
I would like to generate a route using those same point with my own road network.
Then I want to be able to detect if there is any significant difference between the two routes.
One suggestion is that for the 2 routes, we find out what road segments they travel across, and compare the list of road segments?
Is this a valid approach?
How do we go about getting the list of road segments given a route?
I am using ArcGis server 9.3 with Java 5 and Oracle 10g. I am using the ST functions and NetworkAnalyst via the java api.
Thanks.
Calculate the route using your points and road network. Then buffer the resulting route into a polygon (the buffer radius should be your "tolerance"). Then clip the external route using your polygon. If the resulting polyline is non-empty, then there is a deviation outside of your tolerance.
This method does not acount for any "significant" deviations such as backtracking, U-Turns, or taking a nearby parallel road.
Alternatively, you can compare the resulting "directions" and check for deviations there--particuarly using street names. This saves you from checking every road segment. If you have any deviations in road names, then check the individual road segments of each section.
I've just implemented something similar in my application. I have a list of lat/long coordinates from a GPS device and needed to create a route based on this data.
I started by matching each GPS position with a node in my street network. I then removed 'consecutively duplicate' nodes to filter out those consecutive positions that are at the same node. Then, I started 'walking' through my street network, starting at the first node. I checked the first node and second node and checked for a common street segment. If I found one, great. If not, I create a shortest path between the 2 nodes and use those roads instead. I continue doing this until I've examined all the nodes. At the end of this process, I have a list of road segments that the vehicle traveled and the order in which they were traveled, too.
Unfortunately, I'm using a different map, different programming language, and different database. As such, sharing the code won't be helpful to you at all. Hopefully the process I described above will be enough help for you to accomplish your task.

How can I take numerous shapefiles and have them line up in GIS?

I am trying to take a shapefile of subdivisions within a county that I have created and line it up with another shapefile that was given to me by the County Appraisal District (parcel data). When I try to get them to line up then my streets shapefiles is not aligned with everything else. They are all on the same coordinate system and I do not want to have to recreate the shapefile for the subdivisions. Any thoughts?
This is a question with answers that may be simple or may be very complex, depending on your situation. As a GIS developer, I've most commonly seen this as a symptom of an incorrectly defined coordinate system. However, whether this is the case or not, and what the solution is strongly depends on your environment. From here on, I'll assume that you're working in an ESRI package...
I agree with the other posters that your problem is one of mismatching projections and/or datum definitions.
The most important thing to understand as regards projections in ESRI software is this:
Manually setting the projection of a dataset (shapefile, geodatabase feature class, etc) in ArcCatalog does NOT reproject that dataset!!!
In order to reproject your data, you must EXPORT the data from an ArcMap session in which you've been working and where the data is obviously lined up correctly. During the EXPORT, you are given the choice of saving your data with the coordinate system of the underlying map or that of the original dataset.
Your best bet is to follow these steps to create a new dataset with the correct projection and then extrapolate what you need to do to fix your specific problem:
Create a new ArcMap session and set its coordinate system:
Do this in a fresh ArcMap session with NO OTHER DATA. Be sure to explicitly set the coordinate system of the ArcMap mapview to your desired coordinate system (I recommend the one that matches the data you're trying to overlay, or one from another well-established dataset).
Add one other dataset with a known good coordinate system.
Create your new dataset in this ArcMap session. Give your new data the same coordinate system as the ArcMap mapview and the one other dataset in the map. Set the XY domain of the new data to exceed the area defined by your other dataset, but don't go beyond the size that will reduce your desired spatial resolution.
Create your data. It can be any data at this point. Some lines, some polygons, etc. Save your work.
Export your new dataset. When prompted, choose to save with the coordinate system of the underlying mapview.
Create a new ArcMap session and add your new dataset. Then add your parcel dataset. They should now occupy the same space in your map window.
Edit your new data to your heart's content.
Some probable issues if this doesn't help:
You didn't follow these steps correctly - check the ESRI documentation; this is a well documented issue.
The parcel data you're trying to match doesn't have properly defined coordinate system. It's always possible that the keepers of this data don't know what they're doing and have munged it up. I've seen this problem more times that I care to admit.
You've matched the projection but have mis-matched the datum. Many municipalities are still using data in NAD27, which is way out of date. Some have moved to the modern NAD83. The difference can be up to 300 meters, depending on where in the country you are. Also, data that originates from surveying or GPS equipment is usually collected in WGS84 (the typical default for satellite surveying), which is for all practical purposes the same as NAD83, at least at mapping scale resolutions.
Try researching these issues and see how it goes. I'll say it again:
Manually setting the projection does NOT actually project that data!!
Good luck!
Your problem is probably one of projection
| projection: character string that names a map projection to use. See
| 'mapproject' (in the 'mapproj' library). The default is to
| use a rectangular projection with the aspect ratio chosen so
| that longitude and latitude scales are equivalent at the
| center of the picture.
`-----
Agree that your problem is projection. Is there a .prj file extension associated with either of your files? If not key first is finding out what projects you have. I would guess State Plane of some sort if you are dealing with U.S. centric local data from a local government.
Cadastral tools (surveyer tools) usually let you specify a handful of control points and will then "warp" the data to fit to your control points. This can be anything from a simple shift to something more complex. If everything is shifted by a few feet, you can also just use your "editor" to select all shapefiles and then move them however many feet necessary.
If you've verified that both shapefiles are using the same coordinate system, then projection is less likely to be the problem. It's fairly common for parcel data to be "offset" from other data sources (such as roads). This comes from inconsistent collection methods and points of reference.
Another source of error can be that one of the shapefiles has the wrong coordinate system specified. For example, if the roads were actually WGS 1984, but it's prj is set to NAD1983, you will see some significant errors. This usually happens if you had to manually set the coodinate system for a shapefile (i.e. it didn't include a PRJ and you created one).

Map Routing, a la Google Maps?

I've always been intrigued by Map Routing, but I've never found any good introductory (or even advanced!) level tutorials on it. Does anybody have any pointers, hints, etc?
Update: I'm primarily looking for pointers as to how a map system is implemented (data structures, algorithms, etc).
Take a look at the open street map project to see how this sort of thing is being tackled in a truely free software project using only user supplied and licensed data and have a wiki containing stuff you might find interesting.
A few years back the guys involved where pretty easy going and answered lots of questions I had so I see no reason why they still aren't a nice bunch.
A* is actually far closer to production mapping algorithms. It requires quite a bit less exploration compared to Dijikstra's original algorithm.
By Map Routing, you mean finding the shortest path along a street network?
Dijkstra shortest-path algorithm is the best known. Wikipedia has not a bad intro: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm
There's a Java applet here where you can see it in action: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/people/JamesStewart/270/9798s/Laffra/DijkstraApplet.html and Google you lead you to source code in just about any language.
Any real implementation for generating driving routes will include quite a bit of data on the street network that describes the costs associate with traversing links and nodes—road network hierarchy, average speed, intersection priority, traffic signal linking, banned turns etc.
Barry Brumitt, one of the engineers of Google maps route finding feature, wrote a post on the topic that may be of interest:
The road to better path-finding
11/06/2007 03:47:00 PM
Instead of learning APIs to each map service provider ( like Gmaps, Ymaps api) Its good to learn Mapstraction
"Mapstraction is a library that provides a common API for various javascript mapping APIs"
I would suggest you go to the URL and learn a general API. There is good amount of How-Tos too.
I've yet to find a good tutorial on routing but there are lots of code to read:
There are GPL routing applications that use Openstreetmap data, e.g. Gosmore which works on Windows (+ mobile) and Linux. There are a number of interesting [applications using the same data, but gosmore has some cool uses e.g. interface with websites.
The biggest problem with routing is bad data, and you never get good enough data. So if you want to try it keep your test very local so you can control the data better.
From a conceptual point of view, imagine dropping a stone into a pond and watching the ripples. The routes would represent the pond and the stone your starting position.
Of course the algorithm would have to search some proportion of n^2 paths as the distance n increases. You would take you starting position and check all available paths from that point. Then recursively call for the points at the end of those paths and so on.
You can increase performance, by not double-backing on a path, by not re-checking the routes at a point if it has already been covered and by giving up on paths that are taking too long.
An alternative way is to use the ant pheromone approach, where ants crawl randomly from a start point and leave a scent trail, which builds up the more ants cross over a given path. If you send (enough) ants from both the start point and the end points then eventually the path with the strongest scent will be the shortest. This is because the shortest path will have been visited more times in a given time period, given that the ants walk at a uniform pace.
EDIT # Spikie
As a further explanation of how to implement the pond algorithm - potential data structures needed are highlighted:
You'll need to store the map as a network. This is simply a set of nodes and edges between them. A set of nodes constitute a route. An edge joins two nodes (possibly both the same node), and has an associated cost such as distance or time to traverse the edge. An edge can either either be bi-directional or uni-directional. Probably simplest to just have uni-directional ones and double up for two way travel between nodes (i.e. one edge from A to B and a different one for B to A).
By way of example imagine three railway stations arranged in an equilateral triangle pointing upwards. There are also a further three stations each halfway between them. Edges join all adjacent stations together, the final diagram will have an inverted triangle sitting inside the larger triangle.
Label nodes starting from bottom left, going left to right and up, as A,B,C,D,E,F (F at the top).
Assume the edges can be traversed in either direction. Each edge has a cost of 1 km.
Ok, so we wish to route from the bottom left A to the top station F. There are many possible routes, including those that double back on themselves, e.g. ABCEBDEF.
We have a routine say, NextNode, that accepts a node and a cost and calls itself for each node it can travel to.
Clearly if we let this routine run it will eventually discover all routes, including ones that are potentially infinite in length (eg ABABABAB etc). We stop this from happening by checking against the cost. Whenever we visit a node that hasn't been visited before, we put both the cost and the node we came from against that node. If a node has been visited before we check against the existing cost and if we're cheaper then we update the node and carry on (recursing). If we're more expensive, then we skip the node. If all nodes are skipped then we exit the routine.
If we hit our target node then we exit the routine too.
This way all viable routes are checked, but crucially only those with the lowest cost. By the end of the process each node will have the lowest cost for getting to that node, including our target node.
To get the route we work backwards from our target node. Since we stored the node we came from along with the cost, we just hop backwards building up the route. For our example we would end up with something like:
Node A - (Total) Cost 0 - From Node None
Node B - Cost 1 - From Node A
Node C - Cost 2 - From Node B
Node D - Cost 1 - From Node A
Node E - Cost 2 - From Node D / Cost 2 - From Node B (this is an exception as there is equal cost)
Node F - Cost 2 - From Node D
So the shortest route is ADF.
From my experience of working in this field, A* does the job very well. It is (as mentioned above) faster than Dijkstra's algorithm, but is still simple enough for an ordinarily competent programmer to implement and understand.
Building the route network is the hardest part, but that can be broken down into a series of simple steps: get all the roads; sort the points into order; make groups of identical points on different roads into intersections (nodes); add arcs in both directions where nodes connect (or in one direction only for a one-way road).
The A* algorithm itself is well documented on Wikipedia. The key place to optimise is the selection of the best node from the open list, for which you need a high-performance priority queue. If you're using C++ you can use the STL priority_queue adapter.
Customising the algorithm to route over different parts of the network (e.g., pedestrian, car, public transport, etc.) of favour speed, distance or other criteria is quite easy. You do that by writing filters to control which route segments are available, when building the network, and which weight is assigned to each one.
Another thought occurs to me regarding the cost of each traversal, but would increase the time and processing power required to compute.
Example: There are 3 ways I can take (where I live) to go from point A to B, according to the GoogleMaps. Garmin units offer each of these 3 paths in the Quickest route calculation. After traversing each of these routes many times and averaging (obviously there will be errors depending on the time of day, amount of caffeine etc.), I feel the algorithms could take into account the number of bends in the road for high level of accuracy, e.g. straight road of 1 mile will be quicker than a 1 mile road with sharp bends in it.
Not a practical suggestion but certainly one I use to improve the result set of my daily commute.