Travel time matrices are a way of calculating the journey times between 1000's or origins and destinations in one go. This often gives much more relevant and insightful data than a traditional 'distance matrix'.
Potential use cases include:
Assessing the impact of a potential office move on employee commute times
Allocating clients to sales reps or engineers based on minimising travel times
Directing users to their nearest store/facility/centre (nearest in terms of time not distance!)
In the example below we have two layers of points loaded onto the canvas in Pro. One is the eight facilities that we run across London, while the other is the addresses of all of our facility users.
We want to allocate each user to their nearest facility based on the shortest travel time via public transport. To do this, open the Time Filter Advanced tool from the TravelTime toolbox in the Catalog pane.
To calculate the travel times from each user to each facility, to arrive at the facility at 10am, configure the tool as below.
The Departure Locations ID and Arrival Locations ID fields must be unique amongst all records, else an error will be returned.
The Travel time (in minutes) field can be used to filter the output into Reachable and Unreachable locations. Here we want every possible route to be returned, so we set it as 240 (the maximum value allowed).
Run the tool, and open the Attribute Table of the resulting output layer.
Here we have a table with the travel time (in seconds) between each user address (Departure_locations_id) and each facility (Arrival_locations_id).
To create a matrix, simply use the Table to Excel tool to export this data into Excel and create a pivot table (or similar).
To learn how to configure more advanced parameters, including the ability to calculate travel times for arrival or departure times within a time window, visit our ArcGIS Advanced Parameters tutorial.