Discovery Mission: Visualize Hazards & Truck Routes using SAP HANA Cloud – The Engine for Spatial Analytics

In this blog, am going to discuss about the latest addition to the missions in the SAP Discovery Center,  “Visualize Truck Routes & Hazards Using Geo Spatial Processing” . In this mission, we explore  the multi-model capabilities of SAP HANA Cloud with focus on Spatial Engine and the real time processing of location data from 3rd party APIs to SAP HANA Cloud thereby transforming it to Line strings , Polygons & Wedges. And these spatial transformations are done real-time and available for  SAP Analytics Cloud visualization.

We have taken the reference architecture as below from one of our existing  customer implementation and the mission focuses on the Spatial Data Transformation & Visualization involving the following Business Technology Platform Components: SAP HANA Cloud , SAP Analytics Cloud & developments based on SAP Business Application studio.

Architecture

In this mission we cover multiple scenarios for Spatial transformations on SAP HANA Cloud. One of the scenarios we worked on was to identify burning location fronts using wedges on SAP Analytics Cloud based on the data from APIs. For this scenario, the frequency with which the APIs sends the data to SAP HANA Cloud varies from seconds to minutes. Once we have the raw data in SAP HANA Cloud, we execute table functions on the location data and build the wedges based on the additional information. And finally the function is consumed in the calculation views for SAP Analytics Cloud visualization. Here are some of the relevant data that is stored in SAP HANA Cloud.  We have the information on co-ordinates for the burning front and additionally the direction of the  burning [in degrees],  the aperture or opening of the burning and the distance between the point of the burn and the color coded limits [ Type A , B &C].

The table functions initially converts the direction of  the fire burn to radians as it makes it possible to relate a linear measure and an angle measure[Simply put radians can take you to places that degrees can’t 🙂 ]. Then we scale the coordinates according to the spatial reference system supported by SAP Analytics Cloud and then finally building the wedges based on the direction, opening and the distance between the burn and the limits. All the logic to build the shapes is completely pushed to SAP HANA cloud and you just use SAP Analytics Cloud for visualization. Once you build the live connection to SAP Analytics Cloud , you should be able to visualize the wedges as shown below. We just used the bubble layer pointing to wedge shape created from table function as location dimension .

Wedges

All the necessary schemas , Spatial transformation functions, procedures & models for SAP Analytics Cloud consumption  are provided as part of the mission . You can access the GitHub Repository once you sign up for the mission and we also provide full coaching if you need help with setting up the content.

Here is the link again for the mission

You can reach out to Stephanie Butler  or myself for additional questions.

All the step by step process to follow has been provided as videos as part of the mission and you should be able to complete the mission by subscribing to  Trial Editions of  SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud.

We are adding additional missions soon and excited to hear your feedback .