MvDataTools - An 'add-on' pack for OmniTRANS

When working on several major OmniTRANS related projects in the UK and Ireland, Minnerva saw the opportunity to develop some tools for OmniTRANS which satisfied a range of needs which were broadly specific to UK ‘practice'.

A common component of many projects is the need to process intercept survey data (e.g. Roadside and Public Transport Interview). Traditionally this is done using a disparate set of tools, usually spreadsheet based, which are ‘re-invented' for each survey and divorced from the transport model.

The attraction of processing survey data within the context of the transport model in which it is to be used was very appealing, and OmniTRANS provided the framework to do this. This allowed us to develop a series of tools which take ‘raw' survey records through the stages of postcode processing, zone coding, validation, expansion through to matrix building. At all stages of the processing, the data can be checked against the underlying network and zonal data, contributing to enhanced understanding and quality of the resulting data.

It is often the case that processing has to be redone again and again as errors in the data are found and corrected; the fact that this is encapsulated in jobs means that processing is repeatable and far less error prone than doing it manually in spreadsheets.

Another theme which emerged was the fact that projects were developing large, complex networks in a multi-user/multi-site environment, which required ways of moving complex datasets between different versions of the projects and users. Although OmniTRANS provides facilities in this respect, more extensive methods were needed, which of course were easily provided by writing jobs.

But although the OmniTRANS ethos is to ‘share and pass jobs around' this was found to be impractical when the jobs were complex and the programming capability of the end user was constrained by resource or limited experience. ‘Ad-hoc' amendments were found to be unproductive, so Minnerva decided to develop these jobs to a ‘formal' and high professional standard, allowing the user to concentrate on the ‘problem to be solved' rather than worrying about how to code the jobs to solve the problem.

Bringing all these ‘tools' together lead to the evolution of the MvDataTools pack, which also contains some useful plug-ins.

  Click here to view the online manual for MvDataTools.