Representation of influence zones in commercial GISs for simulation of directional processes

Abstract

[EN]Influence zone generating is used in different fields: environmental studies, urban areas establishment, road construction and fire propagation. The influence zone is defined as the geometric space of the points that are at a shorter or similar distance to a given object (point, polyline or polygon). The simulation of the phenomena that are subject to constant patterns can be graphically represented by modules included in all commercial geographic information systems (GISs). In this case, the calculated zone is represented as a circle called isotropic buffer. Nevertheless, when we simulate processes as a liquid or a gas expansion, there are directional aspects that need to be considered. Directionality may be graphically represented as an ellipse. In this paper, we perform an analysis of how some of the most used commercially available GISs create influence zones and we highlight the lack of some of them to implement anisotropic or directional influence zones. In addition, we proposed a method to check the anisotropy and the creation of a generator oval that allows to delimit zones of influence that represent phenomena with anisotropic characteristics.