UrMoAC-0.8.2

UrMoAC-0.8.2 (06.08.2024)

This is a maintenance release due to a broken build in v0.8.0.

“Urban Mobility Accessibility Computer” or “UrMoAC” is a tool for computing accessibility measures, supporting aggregation, variable limits, and intermodality. It is a scientific tool.

What the tool basically does is to load a set of origin locations and a set of destination locations as well as a road network and optionally a description of the public transport offer. Then, it iterates over all loaded origins and computes the respective accessibility measure for each of them by routing to all destinations within the defined limit. Optionally, areas by which the origins and destinations shall be aggregated may be loaded.

Some features:

• input is read from databases or files;
• variable origins / destinations;
• variable aggregation options;
• weights for origins and destinations;
• flexible limits for search: max. time, max. distance, max. number, max. seen value, nearest only;
• support for different transport modes, as well as intermodal accessibility measures;
• GTFS-based public transport accessibility computation;
• possibility to read time-dependent travel times (for motorised individual traffic);
• support for data preparation and visualisation.

Changes in release 0.8.0 / 0.8.2

This is mainly a cleaning-up release which removes some inconsistencies and improves the explicitly and correctness of the results.

Changes in options and defaults

• mode names consolidation (you will get a deprecation warning when using old names):
  • "bicycle" is now "bike"
  • "passenger" is now "car"
• output name consolidation:
  • "nm-output" is now "od-output"
  • "ext-nm-output" is now "ext-od-output"
  • "stat-nm-output" is now "stat-od-output"
• replaced ';' as divider by ',' (you will get a deprecation warning when using the old divider):
  • databases definition (input and output)
  • modes to use
  • carrier definition
  • within UrMoAC
  • within included Python-scripts (please note that all fields are now divided using a ',')
• references to database are now defined on the command line like: <HOST>,<DB>,<SCHEMA>.<TABLE>,<USER>,<PASSWD> - schema and table name are divided using a '.', all other fields using a ','
• The default for ID columng of database objects is now "id", no longer "gid"
• The default for the geometry column of database objects is now "geom", no longer "the_geom"
  • If you cannot use your old networks, try to add the option --net.geom=the_geom
  • If you cannot use your old origins, try to add the option --from.geom=the_geom
  • If you cannot use your old destinations, try to add the option --to.geom=the_geom

Debugging and improvements

• patched several documentation issues
• more verbose error handling
• The script "plot_area.py" now supports disaggregated, aggregated, and filled contours visualisations

Changes in computation

• we moved from edge-based to origin-based computation. This solved some oddities and inexact results, but slowed down the computation. We will try to improve the speed back again, keeping the current quality.

UrMoAC-0.6.0

UrMoAC-0.6.0 (26.05.2023)

“Urban Mobility Accessibility Computer” or “UrMoAC” is a tool for computing accessibility measures, supporting aggregation, variable limits, and intermodality. It is a scientific tool.

What the tool basically does is to load a set of origin locations and a set of destination locations as well as a road network and optionally a description of the public transport offer. Then, it iterates over all loaded origins and computes the respective accessibility measure for each of them by routing to all destinations within the defined limit. Optionally, areas by which the origins and destinations shall be aggregated may be loaded.

Some features:

• input is read from databases or files;
• variable origins / destinations;
• variable aggregation options;
• weights for origins and destinations;
• flexible limits for search: max. time, max. distance, max. number, max. seen value, nearest only;
• support for different transport modes, as well as intermodal accessibilities;
• GTFS-based public transport accessibility computation;
• possibility to read time-dependent travel times (for motorised individual traffic);
• support for data preparation and visualisation.

Changes in release 0.6.0

Channels and links

• changed license to EPL 2.0
• added discussions about the project
• docs are now available at readthedocs

New Features

• initial file support (all but GTFS)
  • Attention! option --from-filter was renamed to --from.filter
  • Attention! option --to-filter was renamed to --to.filter
• added --od-connections option which allows to specifiy a table with explicit origin/destination-tuples to route between
• issue #17 added the possibility to save current command line options to a configuration file, to read configuration file
• added the possibility to save an options template
• issue #20 added a custom mode
• issue #28 the precision of floating point values in output can be changed using the --precision option (default: 2)
• issue #38 mapping of objects to edges is now multithreaded (controlled by the --threads option)
• issue #10 SUMO networks can now be loaded directly. The file extension must be “.net-xml”.
• issue #11 origins, destinations, and aggregation areas can now be loaded from SUMO shapefiles directly. The file extension is “.poi.xml”. Please note that UrMoAC only accepts numerical IDs, at least currently.
• You may directly load a SUMO Edge-Based Network State as travel time information.
• issue #42 solved: GTFS files can now be loaded directly from disc
• issue #3 solved: the outputs do not include the access/egress distaces and traveltimes from/to the buildings to/from the road; we assume that this makes the outputs more standard compliant; the access/egress distances are still a part of the https://github.com/DLR-VF/UrMoAC/wiki/OutputFormats
• finally added at least one visualisation tool
• added a citation file
• got a DOI (10.5281/zenodo.7940600)

Debugging and Improvements

• We had a degradation between August 2021 and February 2022 that made public transport routing impossible; it's patched
• We had a degradation between August 2021 and February 2022 that reinserted user password into db comments; it's patched, and comments are only generated when --comment is set
• issue #25 solved: origin weights are not used when no aggregation area is given
• improved (faster) subnets removal
• output
  • issue #14 solved: mapping is sorted by edges, then by objects
• improved mapping of objects to the network; it seems like we've had a glitch which allocated some locations (<1 % in urban areas) to the wrong edge
• extended handling of input errors, especially when reading files. Now, wrong / broken attributes of loaded artefacts should be reported. Let us know if not (when the application stops with an exception)…
• issue #24 solved: Collecting results when aggregating them is now much faster
• issue #48 solved: Better reporting of unconnected networks
  • Option --subnets that keeps unconnected sub-networks was renamed to --keep-subnets
  • Added the option --subnets-summary that lists (very verbose) all found subnets
  • Added the option --subnets-output <OUTPUT> that writes the found subnets
• issue #1 solved: the tool reports when an edge with a velocity or a length of 0 is loaded, as well when an edge id is used more than once
• removed the avg_v field from nm-ext-output as it is too complicated to keep track of connection with dist=0 (same origin/destination) and the value can be easily computed from avg_tt and avg_distance

Tools

• reorganised tools, tools are sorted by source type (osm, gtfs, sumo)
• issue #6 solved: Moved to Python 3.x

UrMoAC-0.4

Some debugging and adding a static documentation.

Uncompress the documentation (site.zip) and start it using
python mkdocs serve

Please find the documentation at https://github.com/DLR-VF/UrMoAC/wiki

Further information can be found at https://github.com/DLR-VF/UrMoAC

UrMoAC-0.2

As an initial starting point for further development, a first versioned release is set up.

Please find the documentation at https://github.com/DLR-VF/UrMoAC/wiki

Further information can be found at https://github.com/DLR-VF/UrMoAC