I found out recently that an article I had guest written and was published on Microsoft TechNet made its way to Number 6 in the Top 10 Articles of 2018!
The Bing Distance Matrix API which was released at Microsoft Ignite in 2018 allows you to generate travel time and distances for a given set of origins and destinations. It can factor in predictive traffic information when generating times thereby allowing you to avoid any potential delays. Some of the other features include, but are not limited to:
- Calculating 1 days’ worth of travel in 15 minute intervals
- Support for multiple transport modes
- Support for GET and POST requests
- Asynchronous support (for larger requests)
- JSON and XML support
Implementing a distance matrix allows you to:
- determine arrival times based on start times
- sort search results by their travel distance or time
- calculate the different in commuter times between locations
- cluster data based on travel time/distance. E.g. Find me all restaurants within a 3-mile radius of the property you’re about to purchase.
In the article I talked about:
- the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP)
- How the API address the TSP
- run through some code examples
- applications of the API
You can find out more information about the API and read the rest of my article on Microsoft TechNet or the Grey Matter developer blog.
Let me know what you think!
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