Pivvot Route generates a suitability corridor and cost surface map based on the PLAE configured for your routing project. These visuals display the data costs driving the route and the least cost path for your route.
Suitability Layers
When Pivvot creates a system-generated route, it is calculating the "least cost" path that follows your objective path based on the preferences configured in the PLAE. As part of that process two suitability layers--suitability (cost surface) and suitability corridor--are created that provide a graphical representations of the relative "costs" (Prefer, Low Avoidance, Avoid, Exclude) configured in the PLAE.
Suitability (Cost Surface)
The suitability map layer provides a visual representation of the costs assigned to the data in the PLAE. This layer will help you to interpret why Pivvot Route made decisions to generate a the route's path, avoiding certain features and preferring others. Understanding this map will help you to edit the PLAE or edit the route to suit your project needs.
How to Interpret the Suitability (Cost Surface) Map
This visual shows your PLAE in colors associated with the weights you have given to each dataset, from preferred in green to exclude in red. The darker the red, the more heavily the PLAE is weighted to exclude. Your system-generated route will attempt to favor the green areas and avoid the darker red areas. If a route is forced to navigate a red area, Route will attempt to make the shortest crossing possible.
Using click to search, you can pull back all of the underlying data crossings in a particular area and interpret each feature on the map. You may choose to update your PLAE to generate a new version of the route. See Configure the PLAE: Prefer, Low-Avoidance, Avoid, Exclude
Suitability Corridor
The Suitability corridor map offers a different perspective for identifying potential routes within the AOI. This map layer highlights potential corridors based on the least cost path determined by the Suitability map and project's objective path. In this visualization, areas shaded in blue closely resemble the corridor of the system-generated route ("least cost path").
You will also notice the suitability corridor layer reveals where other possible corridors exists within the AOI (see the image below), again based on the projects objective path and PLAE configuration.
Using the suitability corridor layer in conjunction with the draw or digitize a route feature enables you to identify and create possible routes that would otherwise not be provided through the system-generated, least-cost path process.
Note: Suitability corridors are only available for system-generated routes. You cannot generate a suitability corridor map layer for uploaded or digitized routes.
How to Generate and View the Suitability Corridor
You have access to suitability corridors based on your Route subscription tier. Please contact us at support@pivvot.com for more information on subscription tiers.
- While configuring your system-generated route on the Routes page, enable the "Calculate Suitability Corridor" toggle.
- Generate the route.
- Once the route has been generated, you will see two new data layers in the Data Layers flyout with the name of your route and the suffix "- Suitability Corridor". These map layer can be enabled in the same way as any of the other data layers that are available.