GeoForm Platform offers geospatial data management, transformations, analysis, and visualization, and has now been extended to include Service Network Isochrones Analysis! This new feature makes it possible to calculate and visualize the service reach provided by a network of facilities, measured in travel time to any facility in that network. The analysis scales to thousands of facilities and even to a country-wide level.
The feature is built on a flexible analysis framework available in GeoForm, where the workflow consists of creating an analysis, preparing it by specifying its parameters, and running multiple executions, with results available for both the latest run and all historical runs. See more on the framework in the first two sections of this blog post.
Isochrones Analysis
Isochrones analysis indicates the regions around a given facility that are reachable from that facility within a specified travel time. Typically, the analysis shows areas accessible within defined time bands, e.g. below 5 minutes, 5–10 minutes, or 10–15 minutes.
Network Isochrones Analysis extends this approach by calculating combined service reach for a network of facilities, indicating accessibility for the group as a whole rather than for a single location.
GeoForm offers both types of isochrones analysis: Facility Isochrones Analysis, which focuses on a single facility, and Service Network Isochrones Analysis, which focuses on a network of facilities such as hospitals or retail chains.
Analysis Parameters
The Service Network Isochrones Analysis requires specification of the area of interest, the network of facilities, the population background (used to calculate the population living within the service-reach regions), and the catchment area (the maximum distance from a facility, converted to travel time).
The input datasets can be flexibly selected from the library managed by GeoForm. For example, a user can select any administrative region in the world as defined by geoBoundaries datasets; facilities can be chosen from virtually anything OpenStreetMap offers (as GeoForm implements a pipeline that extracts OSM data into GeoForm’s dataset library); and the population background can be selected for any country in the world, as it is provided by WorldPop.
Analysis Insights
The analysis prepares a service-area overview, generates network isochrones, and calculates the population living within the resulting regions. All produced artifacts are available for download as PDF (maps), GeoTIFF (population raster), or NDGeoJSON (isochrones, including regions that fall outside the analyzed bands).
The analysis results are presented in the following views:
Service Area Overview
An interactive map displays the area of interest, the facilities, and the population distribution. The system calculates basic statistics for this area: the service area in square kilometers, the population living within it, and the number of facilities located in the area of interest.
Service Reach By Time
An interactive map shows the service-reach areas (green), calculated for the defined travel-time bands, as well as the areas that fall outside the specified travel time (red).
Most Populated Areas with Best Reach
The five most populated areas within the best-reach band. The table provides the population and area of each region. The Area ID shown in the table is also displayed in the Service Reach By Time view.
Most Populated Areas with Worst Reach
The five most populated areas that fall outside the service bands. The table provides the population and area of each region. The Area ID shown in the table is also displayed in the Service Reach By Time view.
Outlook
While the analysis is already available and capable of running at country scale with thousands of facilities, there is still work to be done to improve how the results are presented:
Vector Tiles
The largest Service Reach By Time maps require hundreds of megabytes of data, so the system needs to handle this intelligently by showing fewer details at wider zoom levels. This approach is already supported for raster data (e.g., population), but improvements for vector data are still in progress.
Features Clustering
Currently, the map displays all facilities regardless of zoom level. Introducing clustering will improve readability by showing aggregated counts at higher-level zooms and expanding into individual facilities when zooming in.
Bands population
Although the analysis calculates population and area for all generated regions, the aggregated population totals for each travel-time band are not yet displayed. This enhancement is coming soon.
Symbols layer
The map currently renders all layers above the symbol layer, obscuring elements such as city or street names. An improvement is on the way.
Check the Contacts page to get in touch—whether you’re interested in this feature, need a custom analysis for your region, community, or business, or would like to discuss a broader data analysis project. Questions and comments are always welcome.