Workflow diagram

Terminology

Examples

• A department store with a rewards program wants to know how far its patrons are traveling to shop. An analyst uses the Connect Origins to Destinations tool to find the travel distance between each patron (using ZIP Codes for location) and the store.
• An elementary school teacher is planning a class trip and has assembled a short list of some possible destinations. The final decision will be based in part on how long it will take to travel to the destination. The Connect Origins to Destinations tool can be used to measure the drive time between the school and each of the possible trip locations.
• A biologist is studying site fidelity in a migratory species of song bird. During the first year of the study, all of the nesting pairs were tagged and the location of their nests were recorded. In the second year of the study, the biologist went back to the study area and recorded the coordinates of the new nest locations for the returning birds. The Connect Origins to Destinations tool can be used to find the straight line distance between nesting sites in the first and second year for each bird.

Usage notes

Two input point layers are required: one with the origins and one with destinations. The connections between origins and destinations are summarized in the following table:

Origins and destinations can be connected using a line distance or one of several travel modes. Some travel modes have an option for using traffic conditions. When traffic conditions are used, they may be based on live conditions or typical conditions for a specified day of the week and time. Live traffic conditions can be offset up to 12 hours from the current time. Times for typical conditions can be set by 15-minute intervals for the entire day and night.

Travel modes can be configured by the administrator of your organization. The administrator can also add new travel modes or remove travel modes that are not necessary for your organization. The default distance measure will be in Miles or Kilometers, depending on the Units setting in your profile.

The Select barrier layers parameter can be used to specify one or more features that act as temporary restrictions when traveling on the underlying streets.

The Route shape parameter determines how the output routes appear when connecting origins to destinations. Straight line (default) generates straight lines (also called desire lines) between the origins and destinations, whereas Follow streets returns the routes in the shape of the street network. The same calculation for matching origins and destinations is used regardless of which route shape is chosen. The calculation will always be based on your chosen travel mode. If a line distance is used instead of a travel mode, only Straight line will be available as the Route shape.

The output layer contains route lines including measurements between each origin and destination.

If you select Include route layers, each route from the result is also saved as a route layer. A route layer includes all the information for a particular route, such as the stops assigned to the route, as well as the travel directions.

If Use current map extent is checked, only the features that are visible within the current map extent will be considered in the analysis. If unchecked, all features in the input layer will be considered, even if they are outside the current map extent.

Limitations

• Inputs can have no more than 5,000 points.
• You must be granted the network analysis privilege to use travel modes.
• The maximum number of route layers that can be created is 1,000. If the result contains more than 1,000 routes and Include route layers is checked, the tool will only create the output feature service.
• An error will occur if the tool takes more than 60 minutes to execute when using travel modes. If this error occurs, try rerunning the analysis with fewer input features.
• You can specify up to 250 features to act as point barriers.
• If the number of street features intersected by all the line barriers exceeds 500, the tool returns an error.
• If the number of street features intersected by all the polygon barriers exceeds 2,000, the tool returns an error.

How Connect Origins to Destinations works

The Connect Origins to Destinations tool uses a geodesic method when finding features with a straight-line distance, rather than a Euclidean method. Geodesic lines account for the actual shape of the earth (an ellipsoid, or more properly, a geoid). Distances are calculated between two points on a curved surface (the geoid) as opposed to two points on a flat surface (the Cartesian plane).

The Live traffic option uses the current time as the departure. The traffic speed is predicted for the trip using live speeds, historical speeds, and current events, such as weather.

When typical conditions for a day of the week and time are used, the travel speeds are based on historical speeds averaged across 5-minute intervals for the entire week. The selected time will correspond to local time in the time zone that your data is in.

When either traffic condition is used, the Connect Origins to Destination tool will take into consideration the changing traffic conditions based on elapsed time from departure.

Creating route layers is useful if you want to share the individual routes with other members in your organization or to further modify the routes using the Directions button in Map Viewer. The route layers use the name provided for the feature layer as a prefix, and the route name generated as part of the analysis is added to create a unique name for each route layer.

Similar tools

Use Connect Origins to Destinations to measure the time or distance between pairs of points. Other tools may be useful in solving similar but slightly different problems.