Service Areas on the GPU and in the Browser, Checked Against ArcGIS
I have used ArcGIS Network Analyst for service areas for a long time. You give it a start point and a few drive times, and it gives you the streets and the area that you can reach. It is correct, and it is the reference that people trust. But it is not fast. For 100 crash locations in Adams County, Ohio, with breaks of 1, 5 and 10 minutes, the solve takes 69 seconds. For all 2,483 crashes, it takes 31 minutes. So I asked a simple question: can a GPU calculate the same service areas, and I mean the same, not "close enough"? And if the GPU can do it, can the browser do it too? In this post, I show the three engines that I built, how I compare them with ArcGIS, and where they do not agree. The source is on GitHub: mraad/service-area . The live page. The mouse moves along a street near West Union, Ohio. The browser calculates the 5-minute service area again at each position. The problem The study area is Adams County, Ohio. The data is a file geodatabase with 3,063...