The second noteworthy news this week is that we have finally introduced the much-awaited time-distance matrix service with which you can finally compute one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many routes for any mode of transport provided by OpenRouteService. This service basically provides a terribly fast computation of time and distance between a set of input locations. Let’s assume you have three locations Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin and want to know the times and distances between these pairs. The matrix endpoints returns this information in a resulting structured matrix table, so something very similar to this:
| From | To | Time (seconds) | Distance (kilometers) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frankfurt | Berlin | 227544 | 650 |
| Frankfurt | Munich | 627324 | 400 |
| Munich | Berlin | 315123 | 500 |
| … | … | … | |
One typical application using this matrix can be found in logistics. Vehicle fleets of these kind of companies may have several locations that need to be visited, preferably in the fastest order. With help of the matrix service one is now able to figure out exactly this best order – also commonly referred to as the Travelling Salesman Problem.
If you are eager to play around with this new feature please sign up for a key at go.openrouteservice.org.