Via 1.8 now available

After a long wait, there is finally a new Via release, Via 1.8. It comes with a long list of major improvements and new functionality:

  • Agents vs. Vehicles: A major change is the strict differentiation between agents and vehicles, as it is performed by MATSim since a few months. This helps to better visualize and analyze some more advanced usages of MATSim like the simulation of shared vheicles, taxis or mini busses. In additition, several analyses got adapted as well, for example the Select Link Analysis which can now analyze either the routes of vehicles, or of the passengers inside — a very interesting option to analyze public transport.
  • Managing Attributes: The way how additional attributes for agents, vehicles, links and so on are managed got streamlined and simplified, while at the same time enhanced with new functionality. Layer’s like “Dynamic Link Attributes”, “Network Difference” or “Vehicle Occupancy” which just provided additional attributes are thus no longer available, with the functionality now integrated in a much cleaner way. In Addition, attributes can now have their own settings, enabling e.g. the link speed attribute to support custom units like km/h or mph instead of MATSim’s default meters per second.
  • Aggregate Vehicles to Links: A new powerful attribute for links allows to create customized aggregations of vehicles’ attributes upon network links. This allows to find out the average age of drivers on a link, the total seating capacity offered on links by public transport vehicles, and similar values.
  • XY Plotter can now visualize lines and areas, and even animate these to create complex, data driven animations. With the addition of displaying XY data relative to the viewing area instead of in a spatial coordinate system, custom overlays now offer great possibilities for enhanced visualizations.
  • Map Backgrounds now support transparent map tiles, e.g. as overlays over existing visualizations.
  • Movie Recorder brings a heavily improved MP4 (H.264) encoder as well as Apple ProRes as new encoding format, optimally suited for post processing Via videos.

These are just the top highlights of the new release. For the full list of changes and improvements, have a look at Via’s manual as well as the upcoming series of short videos about the new features in Via 1.8.

Please note: Due to the major changes, for the first time in Via’s history, we cannot make any guarantees that via-files created with older versions of Via can be successfully opened in Via 1.8. We apologize for the inconvenience this might pose.