The radii of the rings are determined by expanding out from the store location until they meet the given criteria. You define the criteria, or size of each ring, manually.

The following is an example of how this task can be used to examine the optimal location for a new community center in a given market. Assume you have several proposed community center locations in San Diego, California. To create threshold rings for each location, you would set the community center point layer as the store layer. You would then set the threshold data to a standard geographic layer. You can set the field to aggregate to total households and create the ring-based trade areas based on the values you set in the radii parameter.

Each ring created will have the same number of households but will be of different sizes. This task provides an excellent visual indicator of how far each community center will have to draw the same number of households. A city may want to optimize the location of a new community center by finding the location that will minimize how far people will have to travel to a facility. This same logic can be applied to a retail business scenario.

Because the radii is the same for each store, this task is good for comparing the trade areas of similar stores.

This task is typically used to create radius trade areas for competitors so a store owner can see if a store is being cannibalized by the competition. It can also be used to look for gaps in the market area.

The result of this task is a ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BACore.TaskResultOutput object, which is compatible with ArcGIS Server's mapping APIs. FeatureSet, MapImage, and an array of ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BACore.ReportInfo objects can be returned in it depending on the task output options requested. Additionally, the output analysis layer and/or report can be stored to the Business Analyst Server repository.

System.Object
   ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BACore.Client.AbstractTask
      ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BACore.Client.BATask<TResult,TEventArgs>
         ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BAServer.Tasks.BAServerTask<TResult>
            ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BAServer.Tasks.TradeAreas.ThresholdRingsTask

Target Platforms: Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 2000, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003 family, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 family

Reference