Territory Design is part of the Business Analyst extension in ArcGIS Pro. It contains a collection of geoprocessing tools and capabilities to create and manage territories of any size, shape, and location. In the recent ArcGIS Pro 3.1 release, a convenient new feature in Territory Design is the Validate Territories tool. This detects if any territories are breaking or overriding preset rules, like a maximum distance of 30 miles or a territory size of 500,000 households.
Below is an example of warning messages presented by the Validate Territories tool. In this example I assigned new territory elements that broke previously assigned rules, then ran Validate Territories to check for potential problems.
Here is what was found…we have some rule-breakers:
- I set a “do not cross this river” barrier constraint, then I added territories on the other side of it…warning.
- I set an attribute constraint to stop growing the territory at 3 million people, then I added more territories to reach 4.2 million people…warning.
- I set a radius constraint not to exceed 15 miles from a starting center, then added territories at a 30-mile distance…warning.
- I added a territory in a different geographic area, and non-adjacent territories can be considered inefficient…warning.
In the territory attribute tables, the same warning messages are also added to each territory feature record. This allows an easy review of rule-breaking features. Violations can be fixed manually, or a re-run of the Solve process will automatically return the territories to their original status.
To highlight these scenarios in more detail, we have created a workflow video.
Here is a complete list of potential rules violations that Validate Territories looks for:
- Barriers violation
- Buffer distance constraint violation
- Min and max attribute constraint limit violation
- Minimum distance between centers constraint violation
- Maximum territory radius constraint violation
- Territory is empty
- Territory center is undefined
- Territory is not contiguous
- Territory has holes
- Territory name is not unique
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