Click here to see the SAS code.
Click here to see the example.

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This is a SAS/Graph proof-of-concept that shows how a utility company
might visualize its current customers on a map, and also identify 
potential new customers...

Let's say a utility company has a "line" running through a neighborhood
(maybe a gas line, maybe a cable TV line, maybe Internet service, etc).

The utility company no doubt has latitude/longitude coordinates of the
location of the line (or at the very least, the junctions/endpoints, 
and points along the line could be estimated/interpolated).

And then you get a list of street addresses of the houses in that 
neighborhood, and "geocode" the street addresses to find the latitude
and longitude of each house (this could be estimated using SAS'
proc geocode ... or for even more accuracy, the lat/long could 
possibly be obtained from the plats/title data, in counties where
that's computerized).

Then you use SAS to calculate the distance from every house to 
every point along the utility line ("brute force"), and then use
SAS' "geodist()" function to calculate the distance for each of
those, and select the minimum distance for each house (that's the
closest distance each house is from the utility line).

... and then plot all this on a map, using the distance to 
color-code the 'dot' for each house - the "red" ones are the 
potential customers you were looking for! :)


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