I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the 2015 PTV America User’s Group Meeting about our experiences with using Vistro for doing traffic impact studies. The opening session of the meeting covered software enhancements that are being rolled out this winter.
Here are some of the key enhancements being made in Vissim:
- Changing code to more of a hybrid mesoscopic/microscopic simulation approach. This will significantly speed up the time it takes to run a network simulation. This is good news for those of us who have had to leave simulations run over night.
- Adding scenario management so you can make a change to a network in one file and have that change automatically made in other scenarios. This is a huge improvement from both an efficiency and accuracy standpoint. I think this is the biggest upgrade to Vissim since the undo button was added.
Here are some of the key enhancements being made in Vistro:
- Adding an import/export traffic volume feature (like Synchro’s UTDF).
- Adding signal operation templates so we don’t have to create the ring/barrier for each signalized intersection. This will allow us to drop in a reasonable template and tweak as necessary, which will save significant time.
- Partial report selection – instead of getting one giant print out of all figures and tables, we’ll be able to select which figures and tables are part of the output pdf.
- Enhancing signal timing time/space diagrams reports. This will enhance Vistro as a software tool for preparing coordinated signal timing plans.
- Added a feature to move an imported synchro file to the correct geo-spatial location.
