Via 1.2

Since the last release of Via back in January, we’ve been busy updating the application, including new features and improving existing features. Thanks to all the feedback, we’ve been able to improve the usability and the usefulness of Via tremendously. One of the major new features is support for facilities. In MATSim, facilities are often used to model initial demand, and are required if you plan to do location choice. Now, in Via, you can visualize the locations of facilities, filter them by the offered types of activity options, or their opening times.

Many people use Via not only for visualizing simulation results, but use it already during the modeling of new scenarios to quickly check if converted data “makes sense”. With the vastly improved functionality provided by the XY layer, it is now even easier to quickly extract some location data from existing data sets and visualize the locations in Via to get a quick glance on the data. The new features of the XY layer allows to differentiate the display of locations based on arbitrary attributes, including color, size, visibility and form. This makes it also suitable to display locations of moveable objects other than agents, or other spatial information such as GPS tracks. After having reduced the amount of required memory vastly for visualizing large scenarios in version 1.1, Via 1.2 is able to load even more data in the same amount of memory – or requires less memory to manage and visualize the same amount of data. The graph below shows the differences in memory usage between the different versions of Via for a test scenario (high-res network with about 1.3m links, 100m events, 1m agents). As can be seen, the major memory savings are achieved with the network and a little bit with vehicles and activities, resulting in about 15% less memory usage in this example.

In addition, there have been a large number of smaller fixes and improvements, too many to list them here all. Why don’t you just download the new version and give it a try?