How Dissolve By Attribute Range (Business Analyst) works

Use the Dissolve By Attribute Range tool when you want to aggregate and dissolve features based on a specified attribute or attributes. For example, you could take a feature class containing sales data collected on a county-by-county basis and use Dissolve By Attribute Range to create a layer containing contiguous sales regions based on the name of the salesperson in each county. Dissolve By Attribute Range creates the sales regions by removing the boundaries between counties represented by the same salesperson.

Another effective use of this tool is to use the output from the Original or Advanced Huff Model and dissolve the attribute probability field. For example, you can create primary, secondary, and tertiary trade areas based on the output probabilities of the Original Huff Model. The output from the Huff Model tools in Business Analyst creates a probability for each subgeography unit in the study area. For example, the output from the Huff Models will create a probability of households in each block group for patronizing a new store location.

The Dissolve By Attribute Range tool allows you to collapse the probability attributes in the block groups to create trade areas. For example, you can create three trade areas with the following probabilities:

• 70–100 percent
• 40–70 percent
• 10–40 percent

In this case, the output feature class would contain the three polygon features based on the ranges above. You can then use these trade areas to effectively target these areas to suit your business needs, such as marketing campaigns, sales territory generation, and so forth.