Routing services can be published as standard routing services or custom routing services. The standard routing services are fully integrated with Esri out-of-box applications and provide capabilities available with Network Analyst whereas the custom routing services, as the name suggest, provide additional capabilities or further flexibility in the analysis workflows.
Standard routing services
Routing services are published from a network dataset. You should make any changes to your network dataset, such as adding new cost attributes or configuring live traffic, before publishing routing services.
If your network dataset is enabled for live traffic, you can configure it to read live traffic data in one of the following ways:
- From ArcGIS Online using the Configure Network Dataset Live Traffic utility.
- If you are using OpenLR live traffic, the network dataset can be configured with traffic feeds provided by a data provider such as TomTom using ArcGIS Pro.
You can use one of the following workflows to publish the standard routing services from a network dataset:
- Use the Configure routing services dialog box from the ArcGIS Enterprise portal website—Introduced at ArcGIS Enterprise 11, this user interface will provide directions on how to publish standard routing services.
- Use the Publish Routing Services command line utility—If you are using an older version of ArcGIS Enterprise portal or using a stand-alone server running ArcGIS Server, use the Publish Routing Services command line utility that ships with ArcGIS Server installation.
The Configure routing services dialog box and the Publish Routing Services utility publish the same set of services and automate all the steps required to publish the various routing services based on your network dataset. With both options, you can specify additional service properties using a configuration file. You can change the default values used by your services by modifying this configuration file. This configuration file works equally well with either the website or the command line utility tool that you use to publish your standard routing services.
If your network dataset is configured to use live traffic, it is essential to ensure that the live traffic data utilized by routing services is updated at regular intervals. Learn more about how to perform this workflow.
Standard map-service-based routing services can also be published from ArcGIS Pro. For example, you must use a different network dataset than the one used by services created with the Publish Routing Services utility. Your organization may perform a majority of its network analysis based on street centerline data using applications such as ArcGIS Pro or the analysis tools available in Map Viewer. At the same time, you may also need to perform analysis on an indoor transportation network representing walkways and hallways inside your campus using applications with ArcGIS Indoors. In these cases, you can use the Publish Routing Services utility to publish all the routing services based on the network dataset created from your street centerline data. You can publish additional routing services (as map services with the network analysis capability) based on your indoor network dataset and use these routing services with applications available with ArcGIS Indoors.
Learn more about publishing a map service with network analysis capability using ArcGIS Pro
Tips
Once you have published the standard routing services, you may need to update these services—for example, if you had published standard routing services using the command line tool using ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9.1 and upgraded to ArcGIS Enterprise 11. The newer version will automatically have these standard routing services since they were present in your previous version of ArcGIS Enterprise. However, keep the following in mind:
- After your upgrade is complete, don't start using the services that came from the older version because in some scenarios those services might be missing some new parameters that were added in the newer version of ArcGIS Enterprise or certain new capabilities might not work altogether. It is recommended that you delete the upgraded services and then recreate the services from scratch using either the command line utility tool or the portal website.
- If you were working with one version of StreetMap Premium data and upgraded to a newer version, it is recommended that you delete the existing services and recreate the new ones so that you can get all the capabilities available with the new data.
Note:
Since you are using out-of-the-box provided tools to publish these services, any applications that rely on the existing URLs will not break after you delete and republish, because these tools are meant to recreate the new services with the same URLs for these services.
Custom routing services
In some scenarios, the standard routing services created from Configure routing service or the Publish Routing Services utility may not be adequate. In such cases, you can publish routing services to your ArcGIS Server site using ArcGIS Pro. For example, you can find a route between two stops and generate an elevation profile for that route or combine multiple network analyses into a single web service. For such an analysis, you can create a custom routing service.
Learn more about publishing custom routing services in ArcGIS Pro
Routing services with customization
Both standard routing services and custom routing services can invoke custom directions and custom evaluators. This capability is introduced with ArcGIS Server 11.2.
Learn more about deploying custom directions and custom evaluators in routing services hosted on an ArcGIS Server site.