Generating Corridors

what is a corridor? a corridor is the first stage in exploring viable route options it is often aligned to a specific objective (e g , “find me a corridor where all routes are likely to obtain permits” ) and generally returns a wider area to provide flexibility to an initial routing study in optioneer, corridor generation uses a docid\ mc iqzkhf9iyf6rabdo25 designed to produce results quickly—typically within 10–20 minutes corridors give you an early understanding of project feasibility, help identify potential pinch points, and provide insight into the sensitivity of constraints in your configurations they can also be used to define the search area for downstream route generation how to generate a corridor if you need more information on the earlier steps, see docid\ syz9arnkk8ipehnexea6c step description image 1 navigate to the setup tab 2 on the right hand toolbar, select generate and corridors 3 add points use the (+) button to choose the points between which you want to generate corridors if additional points are required, click the freehand icon next to clear all add waypoints to guide the algorithm and encourage exploration of specific areas when you’re finished selecting points, click confirm features to proceed 4 pick a corridor to optimize within ( optional ) you can choose to define spatial bounds for the search by using a previously generated corridor , or creating a manually defined search area this step is optional but can help focus the optimization within specific regions 5 configuration this step tells optioneer how to prioritize the evaluation and selection of corridors note at this point, you will see no go zones displayed on the map (as defined in your configuration) make sure your selected points are not located inside a no go zone —otherwise, optioneer will not be able to generate a feasible corridor 6 final step name and run your case give your corridor generation case a name and, if helpful, a description once submitted, you’ll receive an email notification when the case completes the generated corridors will then be available in the results library nice work—your corridors are ready to explore! how to understand the corridor output corridors provide an effective way to visually assess the constraint landscape for your project because they are one of the earliest stage outputs , it is generally recommended to overlay them with key gis data layers this helps you better understand and illustrate the primary considerations that will drive downstream project activities at this stage, optioneer uses the simplified least cost path (lcp) algorithm, where “least cost” equates to penalty the returned corridors summarize all paths where the resulting penalty falls within 1%, 3%, 5%, 10%, or 20% of the lowest penalty path the five least cost paths displayed in optioneer, with each band shown in a different color note downstream route generation allows users to incorporate real cost modeling parameters for this reason, we refer to the parameter above as “penalty” —even though the algorithm itself is somewhat confusingly named unfortunately, we don’t control the naming of standard algorithms, only our proprietary ones used in later project stages (more on that later) tip 1 for reviewing corridors when you notice corridors avoiding specific areas, click on that area of the map the point inspection tool will pop up automatically, and it also lives in the bottom left corner of the map under the layers heading, toggle show hidden to see all project data layers present at that location switch layer visibility on and off to quickly understand which constraints are driving corridor behavior when finished, create a saved view to store the map state and share it with colleagues inspecting layers that are driving the corridor behavior