Location is everything for business. This web application offers you an essential tool to determine the optimal new factory site selection area given the criteria you specify. On this web map, there are two main layers, the railways and the rivers, located in Alabama State, USA.

You can click the “portfolio” style icon on the upper right of this app to perform the new factory site selection. It shows three different parameters under the input section that can be manually modified according to your needs. The result of this input function is to display certain areas in Alabama that satisfy three parameters, “Distance to railroads”, “Distance to rivers” and “Distance of interest”, as you indicate them before you drop a pin, location of interest on the map. It will take a few seconds for this app to deliver the result after your input. Besides this site selection widget on this app, you may find other widgets helpful to execute your location plan, such as the measurement, the base map gallery, the share and print widgets. If you are not certain about where to drop the pin of your input location of interest, you can delete the pin on this map and restart your selection criteria.

You might wonder how this GIS web application calibrate the input and display the result on the map. The method for this process comes with a GIS model, as a workflow that strings together a chain of geoprocessing tools, delivering the output of one tool into another tool as input. From the image of the GIS model for new factory site selection, noting all elements color-shaded, the blue-colored round elements are inputs to the model, while the yellow rectangular are the tools. The output in the model, which is the green round element, can be feeding the output of the previous tool into the next tool as input, for instance, the green rounds near the middle of the model.

Imagine you have set all the parameters in the input panel of the site selection widget, this is the procedure to fulfill the input of all the blue-colored rounds in this model, besides the rivers and railroads input are the existing layer of this web map. Following the workflow of the interest point input, you will see the Buffer 1 tool, which creates a buffer of your specified distance around the location that you indicated on the map. For the next two tools, clip 1 and clip 2, followed by the green-round point buffer result and the existing rivers and railroads feature layers, are going to select the portion of the rivers and the railroads out of the point buffer result.

After the output clipped layers of the rivers and railroads that will become the input of the next tool, the buffer 2 and 3 tools are going to create buffer polygons around the input clipped layers to the specified distance as you have inserted. As the result of the rivers and railroads buffers are carried out successfully, proceeding to the next tool, intersect, is to compute a geometric intersection of the input features, in this case the rivers and railroads buffers. Next, the intersect output, in the green-round shape, is the overlapped portion of all input buffer layers. Last but not least, the dissolve tool will create a new coverage by merging adjacent “intersect output” polygons. Eventually, you will see the orange-colored area in the map as the result of this model.