Incorporating Amsterdam's modelling system within OmniTRANS

Developed by: Omnitrans International BV
Client: Amsterdam Department of Traffic (DIVV)
Country: The Netherlands
Agent: -
Project year: 2009

The Amsterdam Department of Traffic (DIVV) began in the early 70s to develop their own traffic modelling package called 'GenMod' which, at the time, ran on VAX-computers.

Maintaining and supporting this standalone system has become less viable through time, and three years ago a feasibility project showed that OmniTRANS could be used as a hosting application for the system, allowing specific features of the model to be preserved, but housed within a modern and continually developing software package.

Integrating GenMod's functionality within OmniTRANS was simplified by the fact that it was already using the Ruby programming language, which is the 'native' scripting language used by OmniTRANS. A series of Ruby classes were written which allow the GenMod modules to be accessed directly from the OmniTRANS' Job Engine; the same as any other module or class. As a result, Amsterdam DIVV now uses OmniTRANS for network editing, matrix management, and the visualisation of results, as well as the OmniTRANS job engine to directly access the GenMod model to perform the traffic assignment and modelling.

 Three specific GenMod packages have been integrated into OmniTRANS:

1. AnoWin, an application which calculates link properties (e.g. speed, capacity) based on zonal information and specific link settings. Originally AnoWin also was GenMod's user interface, but AnoWin has become obsolete with the introduction of OmniTRANS.
2. Asspak, the assignment module of GenMod. The traffic assignment module is a static assignment which uses the special link properties as calculated by AnoWin. The static assignment considers junctions, second-best routing and is a capacity-constrained assignment module. The results of Asspak are link volumes and skim matrices.
3. IncreMod, the matrix estimation module. The matrix estimation module uses the GenMod data available within the system. For its application, it uses the matrices from the OmniTRANS project and combines this data with GenMod data sources.

The integration of GenMod in OmniTRANS enables DIVV to use one software application for almost all their transport planning tasks.