Reading and Analyzing Cube Voyager PT Route Trace Files

October 8th, 2013

After an unsuccessful attempt in trading mode choice calibration with bugfixing in Cube, I ended up figuring out several things about Voyager PT and route trace files.

Trace Reports

The trace reports are files that describe the transit routes from one zone to another.  This is a little more detailed than the skim matrices, as the skims don’t tell you which routes are used or the operator of the routes (since there are five transit providers in the OKI model, this is a major concern).  The trace reports look like this (this is from a subset of the OKI model):


REval Route(s) from Origin 10 to Destination 18

10 -> 4835
4835 -> 4839 -> 4865 lines Rt1IB Rt10IB Rt10OB Rt28MOB Rt32IB Rt27IB
4865 -> 4859 -> 18 lines Rt5TankOB Rt5TankIB Rt7TankOB Rt7TankIB Rt9TankIB Rt9TankOB Rt11TankIB Rt16TankIB Rt23TankIB Rt25TankIB
Cost= 65.11 Probability=1.0000

REval Route(s) from Origin 10 to Destination 19

10 -> 4835
4835 -> 4839 -> 19 lines Rt1IB Rt10IB Rt10OB Rt28MOB Rt32IB Rt27IB
Cost= 33.42 Probability=1.0000

REval Route(s) from Origin 10 to Destination 20

10 -> 4835
4835 -> 4839 -> 20 lines Rt1IB Rt10IB Rt10OB Rt28MOB Rt32IB Rt27IB
Cost= 33.42 Probability=1.0000

Voyager PT Setup

There is one thing that’s not really well documented in Cube Help, and that is how to generate the trace reports.  The one thing that has to be done is on the FILEI ROUTEI or FILEO ROUTEO lines, the line must include both REPORTI=z-Z and REPORTO=z-Z.  The report will not generate if only one side is there – both keys have to be there.  There must also be a FILEO REPORTO file, but that’s required for any Voyager PT run.

So What?

Having this was only half the battle.  I needed a matrix of the operator, and for the entire 3,200 (ish) zone model run, the resulting report file is over 1.2 GB (and that doesn’t include Dayton’s transit!).  So I had to go through this file quickly.  Enter Java.

I wrote a quick (both in code and in running) Java program to read the report file and a DBF of the lines (which I got from the geodatabase route layer). The program sorts through the report file looking for the excerpts above, stores them in memory, and then scans through them to output a dbf with the from-zone (I), to-zone (J), and the operator. This is multi-threaded, so on my 8-core beast, it runs very fast.

The Github repository is here.

Now, on to mode choice…

New Project In the Works

May 31st, 2013

I haven’t worked in R in several days because I’ve been working on a new project that will assist with getting good transit speed curves from highway data.  The project is in Java and is on my Github page.

I’m working on making part of it multi-threaded, which is new to me.

A second project that is still in my mind (and I’m not sure if this will become part of this one or another separate project) will be to use transit GPS traces to get good trip length frequencies on transit.

Stay tuned!

More Voyager PT + AWK Goodness

September 20th, 2011

One thing I’ve missed from the old TranPlan days was the reporting group.  We’ve used that for many years to compare our transit loadings by major corridor.  Unfortunately, that functionality was lost going to PT.  I still need it, though, and enter awk.

The script below looks at the transit line file and outputs ONLY the line code, comma-separated.  It uses a loop to check each field for ‘ NAME=’ and ‘USERN2’, which is where we now store our reporting group codes.

BEGIN{
FS=","
RS="LINE"
}
{
	for (i=1;i<20;i++)
	{
		if($i~/ NAME=/)
		{
			printf "%s,",substr($i,8,length($i)-8)
		}
		if($i~/USERN2/)
		{
			printf "%s\n",substr($i,9)
		}
	}
}

The contents of the above need to be saved to a .awk file - I used trn.awk.

To call this, I use a Pilot script to call awk and pass the input and get the output.

*awk -f {CATALOG_DIR}/INPUTS/trn.awk {CATALOG_DIR}/INPUTS/OKIROUTES.LIN >{CATALOG_DIR}/OKIROUTES.CSV

The output of this is a simple two-column comma-separated-value file of the route ID and the reporting group.

Using gawk to Get PT Unassigned Trips Output into a Matrix

July 15th, 2011

In the process of quality-control checking a transit on-board survey, one task that has been routinely mentioned on things like TMIP webinars is to assign your transit trip-table from your transit on-board survey.  This serves two purposes – to check the survey and to check the transit network.

PT (and TranPlan’s LOAD TRANSIT NETWORK, and probably TRNBUILD, too) will attempt to assign all trips.  Trips that are not assigned are output into the print file.  In PT (what this post will focus on), will output a line similar to this:


W(742): 1 Trips for I=211 to J=277, but no path for UserClass 1.

When a transit path is not found.  With a transit on-board survey, there may be a lot of these.  Therefore, less time spent writing code to parse them, the better.

To get this to a file that is easier to parse, start with your transit script, and add the following line near the top:


GLOBAL PAGEHEIGHT=32767

This removes the page headers. I had originally tried this with page headers in the print file, but it created problems. Really, you probably won’t print this anyway, so removing the page headers is probably a Godsend to you!

Then, open a command line, and type the following:

gawk '/(W\(742\).*)\./ {print $2,$5,$7}' TCPTR00A.PRN >UnassignedTransitTrips.PRN

Note that TCPTR00A.PRN is the transit assignment step print file, and UnassignedTransitTrips.PRN is the destination file. The {print $2,$5,$7} tells gawk to print the second, fifth, and seventh columns. Gawk figures out the columns itself based on spaces in the lines. The >UnassignedTransitTrips.PRN directs the output to that file, instead of listing it on the screen.

The UnassignedTransitTrips.PRN file should include something like:


1 I=3 J=285,
1 I=3 J=289,
1 I=3 J=292,
1 I=6 J=227,
1 I=7 J=1275,

The first column is the number of unassigned trips, the second column is the I zone, and the last column is the J zone.

This file can then be brought into two Matrix steps to move it to a matrix. The first step should include the following code:

RUN PGM=MATRIX PRNFILE="S:\USER\ROHNE\PROJECTS\TRANSIT OB SURVEY\TRAVELMODEL\MODEL\TCMAT00A.PRN"
FILEO RECO[1] = "S:\User\Rohne\Projects\Transit OB Survey\TravelModel\Model\Outputs\UnassignedAM.DBF",
 FIELDS=IZ,JZ,V
FILEI RECI = "S:\User\Rohne\Projects\Transit OB Survey\TravelModel\Model\UnassignedTransitTrips.PRN"

RO.V=RECI.NFIELD[1]
RO.IZ=SUBSTR(RECI.CFIELD[2],3,STRLEN(RECI.CFIELD[2])-2)
RO.JZ=SUBSTR(RECI.CFIELD[3],3,STRLEN(RECI.CFIELD[3])-2)
WRITE RECO=1

ENDRUN

This first step parses the I=, J=, and comma out of the file and inserts the I, J, and number of trips into a DBF file. This is naturally sorted by I then J because of the way PT works and because I am only using one user class in this case.

The second Matrix step is below:

RUN PGM=MATRIX
FILEO MATO[1] = "S:\User\Rohne\Projects\Transit OB Survey\TravelModel\Model\Outputs\UnassignedAM.MAT" MO=1
FILEI MATI[1] = "S:\User\Rohne\Projects\Transit OB Survey\TravelModel\Model\Outputs\UnassignedAM.DBF" PATTERN=IJM:V FIELDS=IZ,JZ,0,V

PAR ZONES=2425

MW[1]=MI.1.1
ENDRUN

This step simply reads the DBF file and puts it into a matrix.

At this point, you can easily draw desire lines to show the unassigned survey trips. Hopefully it looks better than mine!