Product Overview

NetEngine provides you with the capability to define, store, traverse, and analyze many kinds of networks through either a C application program interface (API) or Visual Basic via a type library. Networks can include

• Streets and highways
• Railways
• Bus routes
• Street sidewalks
• Bike paths
• Shipping or air connections
• Warehouse and store aisles
• Campus and hospital corridors
• Electric distribution
• Telecommunications
• Cable or wiring systems
• Gas, water, and sewer pipelines
• Canals, rivers, and streams

NetEngine is very flexible and has been designed for a single or multimodal network facility. NetEngine software's programs can store and manipulate very large physical networks such as the entire highway and street network for a state or country. NetEngine provides a specialized memory management module, giving the programmer access to network representations larger than the virtual memory available to a particular computer.

Why Use NetEngine?

NetEngine is delivered with algorithms for determining

• The shortest path between two or more points*
• The solution to the traveling salesman problem (TSP)*
• The identification of the closest facility
• The computation of origin–destination distance matrices
• The allocation of service areas to a location

* NetEngine has the capability to use hierarchical networks. This gives developers the flexibility to choose a close to optimal performing solution for their users, which is extremely useful when dealing with real-world street networks and other very large data sets.

NetEngine also allows developers to embed their own solvers in custom solutions.

Who Uses NetEngine?

Developers use NetEngine to deliver powerful software solutions to customers or end users who need functions such as pathfinding, site analysis, facility connections, and tracing of network topology. Developers can use algorithms included in NetEngine, such as ESRI's solver for the TSP, or special algorithms of their own design. With NetEngine, users can efficiently model complex situations such as identifying the least-cost/on-time alternative for routing an intermodal container through transfer points between truck, rail, and shipping networks. Transit providers can identify effective alternative routes using bus routes, subways, railways, and even city sidewalks to travel between two nonconnected bus routes.