Travel Time Matrix Protocol Buffers API Use Cases

How does it work?

The Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) Matrix API is built for calculating large travel time matrices with extremely low response times.

It takes as inputs a single origin location and multiple destination locations,and calculates the travel time to each destination for a chosen mode of transport.

Practical applications

Typical Protobuf applications are those that involve large volumes of location data and have extremely high performance requirements.

Consumer-facing Search

Your users can select their desired search location as well as their preferred transport mode and maximum journey time.

Add a travel time search functionality to a consumer-facing site with potentially hundreds of thousands of listings. These listings could be properties, jobs, hotels, or anything else where its location matters for the search.

Such applications will typically already have some sort of location-based search, such as a straight line distance search or a bounding box.

Learn more about a customer implementation here.

Big data applications

Make multiple requests to build large many-to-many travel times matrices. This could be the travel times from every postcode to every other postcode, for example.

These large scale matrices are typically used in data-intensive computations such as efficient route scheduling, or retail gravity modelling.