faq 108399127

How to visualize cars entering a parking facility

by Florian Zenoni on 2017-03-13 10:34:53

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Dear experts,

After some attempts (see here and here), I have finally managed to run an example with the parking extension. The logfiles are attached to this message.

However looking at the output files, both with a text editor and with Senozon Via, it doesn't seem to me that the vehicles are actually using or occupying the parking facilities. How can I make sure? I have also attached the output_events.xml.

Thanks a lot.

Edit: Rephrasing the question, I do visualize activities called "car interaction" in nodes more or less close to parking facilities (whose position are defined on a link, plus x and y coordinates).

1. So why do the cars interact with different nodes? Are they randomly chosen around the position of the parking facility?
2. Is the "capacity" of each facility taken into account in any way? If yes, can I access to the occupancy of the facility as a function of time?

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Comments: 1

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Re: How to visualize cars entering a parking facility

by Joschka Bischoff on 2017-03-20 13:46:34

Dear Florian,

facilities in MATSim are used by agents, not by vehicles.

For the parkingSearch integration, we decided to use the facility container on each link to set the number of parking spaces allocated to each link, mainly because the container allows to store all the informations needed (i.e., a link ID and the capacity) and readers/writers are readily available.

However, the agents do not use the facilities (in a MATSim sense) for their parking interaction. The reason for this is quite easy: A parking interaction only takes a couple of seconds (60 per default), then the agent walks to the actual place of its next activity, meaning it has left the facility.

However, you can easily analyze all kind of parking related questions directly from the events.
The contrib contains some analysis code, not all of it is used by default though: https://github.com/matsim-org/matsim/tree/de704479e15739b39187b298efa0b97e29be3d58/contribs/parking/src/main/java/org/matsim/contrib/parking/parkingsearch/evaluation

For an idea on how to use it, see

https://github.com/matsim-org/matsim/blob/53f9196837742764bef067b3fbb8be1f0fc586a0/playgrounds/jbischoff/src/main/java/playground/jbischoff/csberlin/evaluation/RunParkingEvaluation.java

(Basically, it is somwhat similar to all kinds of event handling in post processing).
It also includes some code that creates CSVs that allow for a visualisation in VIA.

As to your second question:
Activities do not occur on nodes, but on links. Precisely, vehicles leave a link somewhere near the end of it (by default). VIAs default visualisation is then indeed near the node.

Best wishes,

Joschka