Annual report 2023 Product Management Review 2023

Product Management Review 2023

Viriato Highlights From 2023

As part of the ongoing development that we undertake to improve the features of Viriato for our users, amongst many tactical improvements in 2023 we have implemented the following functionality:

Replanning trains

  • In the graphic timetable, a selection of trains can now be moved to alternative tracks, creating overridden trains if needed. This is useful when diverting multiple trains around a known closure for engineering works, or to take advantage of new infrastructure which was not available when the trains were originally planned. This feature can also be used in Viriato Enterprise on a selection of trains from the train list for all trains matching the selected location.
  • Selected train families may be split into separate trains at a node for a given calendar validity. This makes the planning of alternative services, such as replacement buses, much easier when a section of track is closed, as the new service can connect with the unaffected portions.

Vehicle rostering

  • In the graphic timetable, trains may now be coloured by the roster that they belong to which allows the vehicle roster to be visualised immediately.
  • Automatic linking between activities has been improved to optionally respect the rolling stock types.
  • Rosters may be copied between databases allowing the reuse of planned rosters in different projects.

Train configuration

  • The train configuration model was improved allowing all members of a family to share a set of rolling stock configurations, simplifying the management of material within a train family to a common pool of defined units.
  • This view also now shows how many trains within the family are using each configuration set and provides batch operations for combining duplicate definitions and removing unused configurations.

Trip time analysis

  • The trip time analysis now also takes into account commercial trains (i.e. splits and joins where parts of the train may share a common section while travelling to/from different origins/destinations) giving more realistic trip analyses results reflecting whether passengers need to actually change or not when the planned journey involves more complex service patterns.
  • The demand assignment module is now also available for Viriato Enterprise users.

Conflict detection

  • The conflict detection was rewritten as part of the new robustness module to create a modernised service which could be called by external processes (such as for robustness analysis). Although most of the changes made were internal, as part of the re-implementation additional exports to MS Excel reports were added allowing the conflicts between trains and engineering possessions, and between multiple trains to be saved.

Robustness

  • The Robustness module has been reimplemented from scratch to offer improved functionality. The basic analysis principle remains unchanged, where the user can specify where trains experience initial delays, and these are then propagated to determine the consequences on the whole timetable and the time taken to return to the original plan as an indicator of inherent robustness. However, the functionality has also been extended to allow the user to perform more detailed analyses. The improvements include:
  • Improved delay generation methods: The geometric distribution can now be used in addition to fixed probabilities to generate initial delays for trains at all nodes in the model (allowing the modelling of independent events occurring at a constant rate)
  • Stochastic simulations: By combining the results of multiple simulations using the Monte Carlo method a probabilistic view of the robustness is generated.

Path search

  • A new path search module has been released as previously announced. This finds conflict free paths in an existing timetable for new trains based on the data from existing trains ("template trains") automatically provided that all the necessary data for the conflict model is stored in Viriato and respects the Viriato model data such as minimum separation times in nodes, train headway times and topology restrictions.
  • The module can insert only single trains or saturate a timetable until there is no capacity remaining by inserting multiple copies of trains.
  • A track occupation for the visited nodes is automatically performed as part of the process of inserting additional trains. The algorithm maximises the capacity utilisation while minimising the overall journey time of the newly inserted train(s). If necessary, for existing trains a track assignment can optionally be made in the node to improve capacity utilisation.
  • To help the user, if the algorithm is unable to insert new train paths due to issues with the infrastructure base data, the algorithm informs the user where the data should be corrected.

MoD (Microscopy-on-Demand)

  • The topology viewer has been enhanced and can now simultaneously open and display all nodes affected by a conflict and display the itinerary or multiple trains simultaneously. To assist with this the filtering options have been improved.
  • The block occupation and conflict detection over time in the viewer can now be animated to visualise the progress of trains and their potential interactions.
  • The calculation performance has been improved by using incremental conflict detection to  re-use existing results and only calculating for trains which have been changed since the last run.
  • MoD has also been added as an optional module to Viriato Enterprise in addition to Viriato Standard.