News

Via 20.3 released

Shortly before 2020 ends, we have one more major Via update for our users. Via 20.3 brings a major new visualization style for showing multiple attributes at once to various layers, and includes a brand new analysis related to stuck agents.

New and improved features

Mini-Chart visualization

Via provides various attribute-driven visualization possibilities, allowing styling symbols or areas with colors, transparency, and size based on attribute values. While this allows to visualize the values of more than one attribute (e.g. one for size, one for the color), it is not always best suited for comparing the values of two or more attributes. The new visualization option Charts allows to visualize the value of multiple attributes in the form of small bar or pie charts.

Stuck Agent Analysis

Via is great at visualizing and analyzing the agents performing their activities and legs. Agents getting stuck in the simulation during their day on the other hand are hard to analyze, as they just disappear at some point in time.

Via now includes a special analysis to figure out, when and where agents are getting stuck in order to help to better understand why they get stuck. The analysis will show at what time agents were last observed, as well where they were last seen (e.g. on which links or at what transit stops). This serves as a starting point for further analyses, probably leading to coding errors in the network, ill-assigned travel demand, or overused transit stops.

The new analysis is available in the Tools menu.

Additional changes

In addition to the major improvements listed above, the following smaller changes and bugfixes are also part of Via 20.3:

• Support for *.xyz files (often used for digital elevation models)
• Transit-analysis “Transfers at stops” can be heavily customized (colors, filtering, …)
• Define custom default colors that can be easily selected in the color choosers.
• Detailed link geometries can be loaded from link attributes.
• Support unicode characters (e.g. cyrillic) in Ids
• Support Vehicle type attributes for Vehicles layer’s colors and size.
• Support Geopackage-Databases that contain linestring geometries
• Querying multiple shapes works again
• Showing Network Differences failed in some cases when two networks with different links were used

Download the latest version

Go to the Download section to get the newest version of Via!

Via 20.2 released

We are happy to announce that Via 20.2 is now available. The new version brings major improvements to the user interface, a heavily improved Aggregation Analysis plugin, and includes support for new GIS data formats.

New and improved features

User Interface

Via includes a dark theme for all the users who prefer a not-so-bright screen. In addition, Via also includes an alternative light theme that should look the same way on all supported platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux). This might be of use especially if you repeatedly work on different platforms to have a consistent user interface, or where the system-dependent user interface is not optimal (e.g. on some Linux distributions).

In addition, we continued the work from Via 20.1 with supporting Hi-DPI screens by replacing several icons by higher-resolution ones.

Aggregation, OD Aggregation

The settings dialogs for the Aggregation and OD Aggregation were completely reworked. They follow now the same principles as most other settings dialogs (e.g. the one from the Network layer or the Vehicles layer).

In addition, it is now possible to define more than one aggregation at a time. This allows to calculate the minimum, average and maximum at the same time, for example. Or different shares at the same time.

And to make use of the multiple aggregations, the Aggregation Layer now supports not only visualizing the actual zones, but also supports visualizing the aggregations by symbols that can be styled with color, size, transparency, etc.

GIS interoperability

Via 20.2 now supports GeoJSON in various places: First, GeoJSON data can be loaded and visualized with the Shapes Layer, similar how it was already possible with ESRI Shape files before. Second, GeoJSON is now available as data format when exporting spatial data. This includes exporting networks, exporting XY data, transit data, or aggregator zones.

Via actually supports two different flavors of GeoJSON: for one, it can load GeoJSON-files containing a feature collection (typically ending on *.geojson), and so-called newline-delimited GeoJSON-files, which contain multiple separate GeoJSON objects, each encoded on a single line, and separated by newline characters (typically ending on *.geojsonl, also referred to as GeoJson Lines).

In addition to GeoJSON, the new Via version also supports loading data from GeoPackage databases (*.gpkg), which are supported by more and more GIS applications.

Additional changes

In addition to the major improvements listed above, the following smaller changes and bugfixes are also part of Via 20.2:

• Improved scripting support for Network layer, including LinkVolumes and IntersectionFlows analysis.
• Add support for additional emission types from HBEFA 4.1 to the Emissions plugin.
• Provide Trips and Legs to Aggregation analysis, not only Legs.
• Simplified selection of custom coordinate reference systems.
• Fix loading and displaying facilities’ activities options.
• Label backgrounds did not correctly scale with font size in some cases.

The Via manual available online was adapted and extended extensively as well, covering all the new functionality and improved the documentation of existing functionality.

Download the latest version

Go to the Download section to get the newest version of Via!

Via 20.1 released

We’ve been busy working on the next version of Via, and we are happy to finally announce the immediate availability of Via 20.1.

The biggest change in Via 20.1 is hopefully one that most users won’t even notice: Via now runs on Java 11, compared to Java 8 used by older versions. This required us to perform major updates and replace several parts of Via, which can result in a few smaller changes, for example in the user interface, but should not affect the usual workflow. And it enables us to provide additional features and improvements already in this release and in future ones.

New and improved features

Transit Layer:

The new transit router available in Via let’s you quickly query the transit schedule, helping you to understand why too many or too few agents end up on specific lines, verify the correctness of converted schedule data, or just analyze route-choice decisions.

A new query Passengers at Transit Stops shows you at what time and on what lines and routes passengers arrive or depart at selected transit stops.

In addition, Via supports loading transit vehicles in MATSim’s latest data format (vehicleDefinitions_v2), and the transit line search can now also find lines when only the route name is provided.

Vehicles Layer:

The new Vehicle Fleet Statistics allows you to observe the usage of a vehicle fleet over the time of day. It currently supports two metrics, if vehicles are in use or not, and the number of passengers for vehicles. We plan to extend this with additional metrics in future releases, so if you have a specific request, please let us know so we can prioritize it accordingly.

WebMap Layer:

The downloaded map images are now cached for a few days, resulting in higher performance and limited offline availability, e.g. when presenting at conferences. In addition, we reworked the user interface and made it simpler to define multiple custom map servers and include additional WebMap Styles from MapTiler.

Additional changes

There were also a number of smaller improvements and bugfixes:

• Improved display of labels in area shapes
• Fix issue with recording movies with non-even height or width
• show a circle when measuring distances
• add some scaling options to Image layer
• optional confirmation dialog before quitting Via
• display of agent and vehicle plans can be resized
• option to have followed vehicles, agents and points exactly centered
• quering links on top of a WebMap works again
• WebMap geolocation works again

We’ve updated and enhanced the Via manual available online with the latest features and changes.

Download the latest version

Go to the Download section to get the newest version of Via!

Via 19.2.1 released

This is only a very small bugfix release, while we’re working on the next major improvements for Via. This version only fixes the issue with displaying maps from OpenStreetMap as background maps, provided by the Map-Background plugin.

Go to the Download section to get this version of Via if you’re using the Map Backgrounds plugin.

Via 19.2 released

It is already time for Via 19.2. Based on various user feedback, we’ve added and improved features in Via in several places! And there is a brand new online-manual available.

Labels:

Was a single number of value not enough to label your vehicles or links? Now you can define your labels to consist of multiple attribute values, each with an optional pre- and postfix. And to top it off, you can also define a background behind the label to improve the readability of the text.

Multi-part labels with background

Network:

The recently introduced link geometries got improved by now also supporting WKT linestrings to describe the geometry. And the time to initialize a network with link geometries got improved as well, most noticeably for large networks.

General:

• Loading *.via-files is now much faster.
• Add Open Recent menu item to the File menu to quickly open previously worked-on files.
• Add Add Recent Data menu item to the File menu to quickly add recently-used data sources.

New Manual

We’ve completely revamped the user-manual for Via. The old manual was provided as a pdf-file, but its age was showing. The new user-manual is now available online for easy browsing. We’ve updated all the screenshots and adapted and enhanced the text where necessary. The new format as a website also makes it easier to provide direct links to certain topics and allows for simpler updating, letting it play a better role in supporting our Via users. Have a look at the new manual and let us know how we can further improve it to meet your needs!

Other changes

• Overlays can now be scripted to control visibility and styling options.
• Transit stops offer an additional, time-dependent attribute “Number of Waiting Passengers”.

In addition, there were some bug fixes:

• Vehicles: Fix displaying vehicles on loop-links upon a Web-Map.
• Network: Link-Difference-Attributes were not properly saved to/loaded from *.via-files.
• OD-Aggregator: aggregation produced wrong values in certain cases (since 19.1).

Download the latest version

Go to the Download section to get the newest version of Via!