Analysis of the Applicability of the Public Upper Austrian Transport Graph for Solving a Location-Allocation Problem

In this study, the applicability of the Austrian national transport graph “GIP.at”, which is provided and constantly updated by Austrian public authorities, for a location-allocation problem-solving approach is examined. For this purpose ESRI’s ArcGIS Network Analyst™ was applied on the part of the graph which represents the roads of the Province of Upper Austria. Therefore, the geometric network and its attributes are compared with other provider’s geographical data. In a second step the street network graphs are used to solve a location-allocation problem in a case study about an Upper Austrian food retailer. The comparison of the results shows, that using diverse geographic data leads to the same facility locations and allocations. Subsequently, the applied geographic data are investigated in more detail. Missing data attributes which are highly relevant for heavy goods vehicles (HGV) routing like vehicle specific restrictions (height, width, weight) or HGV driving bans are depicted.