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.
• A fire station needs to calculate the response time of an engine from the station to specific points of interest within a city. An analyst uses Connect Origins to Destinations to find the driving time from the fire station to each point.
• A school district needs to determine which students are eligible to ride the school bus. The school bus coordinator uses Connect Origins to Destinations to calculate the walking distance between each student's home and assigned school and then selects the students who live farther from the school than the minimum threshold distance for busing.
• 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 the destinations. The connections created between origins and destinations depends on the numbers of origins and destinations and are summarized in the following table:

Origins and destinations can be connected using a straight line distance or one of several network 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 following table describes the default network-based travel modes available for the Connect Origins to Destinations tool:

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 is always based on your chosen travel mode. If a straight line distance is used instead of a travel mode, only Straight line is available as the Route shape option.

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 only creates the output feature service.
• An error occurs 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 corresponds to local time in the time zone that your data is in. When either traffic condition is used, the Connect Origins to Destination tool takes 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 Classic. 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.

Input origins and destinations

The Connect Origins to Destinations tool behaves slightly different depending on the number of input origins and destinations that are used in the analysis.

Using a single origin or a single destination

If your input contains only one origin or one destination, no special ID fields are required. Using a single origin and one or more destinations results in a connection between that origin and all destinations. Using a single destination and one or more origins results in a connection from every origin to the single destination.

Using multiple origins and destinations

If your input contains more than one origin and more than one destination, the origins and destinations tables must each contain an ID field that you can use to match each origin to a destination. The results include a connection between each origin and each destination that have matching IDs.

For example, suppose that students in a school district are only eligible to ride the school bus if they live more than one mile walking distance from the school they attend. To determine which students are eligible to take the bus, the school district needs to calculate the walking distance between each student's home and assigned school.

The school district has a layer of students' home locations, which are used as origins in the analysis. The layer has a field called School, which indicates the name of the school the student attends.

The school district also has a layer with the school locations, which are used as destinations in the analysis. The school location layer includes a field called Name populated with the name of the school.

Because the School field values in the origins correspond to the Name field values in the destinations, you can use these two fields as the special ID fields that indicate which origin should connect to which destination. Set the ID field in origins parameter to School and the Matching ID field in destinations parameter to Name.

The resulting analysis contains a line connecting each student to the student's designated school, and the analyst can look at the field values in the output to determine which students live farther than the one-mile threshold to be eligible to take the bus.

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.