Equal competition market areas do not adjust for the way people actually travel on the ground. Equal competition market areas are based on as the crow flies distances, while people in the real world have to use roads and streets. A two mile trip might take five minutes on one road network and 15 minutes on another.

Using this task, you can generate the drive time areas that use actual street networks and approximated driving times.

Pizza delivery provides a good case example for the use of drive time polygons. A company may want to limit deliveries to a total of 15 minutes. This means that the delivery radius of each store would be restricted to a 6 minute drive time (six minutes to the delivery point, three minutes at the delivery site, and six minutes to return, for a total of 15 minutes).

Overlap can occur. Some store chains solve this problem by using equal competition areas where drive time overlap occurs, to make each service zone unique and using the drive times at the edge of the built up urban areas to restrict delivery distances and times.

The result of this task is a ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BACore.TaskResultOutput object, which is compatible with ArcGIS Server's mapping APIs. FeatureSet, MapImage, and an array of ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BACore.ReportInfo objects can be returned in it depending on the task output options requested. Additionally, the output analysis layer and/or report can be stored to the Business Analyst Server repository.

System.Object
   ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BACore.Client.AbstractTask
      ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BACore.Client.BATask<TResult,TEventArgs>
         ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BAServer.Tasks.BAServerTask<TResult>
            ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.BAServer.Tasks.TradeAreas.DriveTimeTask

Target Platforms: Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 2000, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003 family, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 family

Reference