The new release of MATSim, release 2007-05-16, was just uploaded to Sourceforge.net. Additionally, the deterministic event-driven queue-based traffic flow micro-simulation (DEQSim), a fast traffic simulation written in C++, is now also available as an extension to MATSim.

The new release offers many improvements for running large scenarios: re-planning is now multi-threaded, and the integrated traffic simulation was optimized to only simulate links where actually traffic happens, speeding up scenarios whit huge networks. Additional routing algorithms work also faster than the previously Dijkstra-algorithm to find the fastest paths through the network. The Dijkstra-algorithm is still available, but was also revised which results in a major speedup compared to the old version.
Addtionally, many file formats can be read and written directly from and to gzip-compressed files, reducing the file-I/O. Besides many bugfixes, existing features like re-planning and scoring got a major overhaul to make them more powerful but less error-prone, but also faster at the same time.
For visualization, we not only support our own simple visualizer and the TRANSIMS visualizer, but support now also Google Earth!

Changelog

The following list is not complete! It only lists the major changes, there were many additional small improvements to make MATSim a bit faster and more stable, but to list them all would be too much in this place.
New Features:

• Support for reading and writing gzip-compressed data like networks, plans and events
• new Re-Planning: less error-prone, more powerful, multi threading for faster execution (package org.matsim.demandmodeling.replanning)
• GoogleEarth Snapshot-Format
• GoogleEarth / KML file format writer, to easily visualize specific data in GoogleEarth (package org.matsim.utils.vis.kml)
• Convert Transims-Vehicle Files to GoogleEarth-Files (class org.matsim.run.Veh2Kml)
• Additional Routing-Algorithms (two A*-Variants, see org.matsim.demandmodeling.router)
• Scoring supports exponential smoothing (config-param "learningRate")
• Resuming Runs (every 10th iteration, a complete plans-dump is written to disk from which a run could be started again by setting the right start-iteration in the configuration)
• Teleportation in mobsim (legs with mode != car are just moved to their destination, no errors thrown)
• Support for a few basic Coordinate-Transformation (CH1903 LV03 -> WGS84, GK4 -> WGS84)
• Support for alternative traffic simulation DEQSim (see "MATSim Extensions")

Feature Improvements:

• Visualizer: can now show node labels
• Improved handling of short links (before, it was possible that the maximum capacity could not be reached due to implementation details)
• Replaced scoring of plans with better and faster code
• Memory Improvements (reading huge plans-files should now use much less RAM)
• Faster Dijkstra-Router
• Much faster preprocessing of plans (using QuadTree for XY2Links)
• Using Objects of class Id as identifiers and no longer int's. Id supports string-identifiers.
• faster mobsim by not simulating links where currently no vehicles are driving on

Bugfixes:

• Too many to list them all ;-)