Transit Schedule Validation

Owned by Marcel Rieser
Last updated: Jun 14, 2021 by Kai Nagel
1 min read

The transit schedule is, compared to other file formats used by MATSim, rather complex. It defines stops, lines, routes, network routes and departures and thus refers to the network and to transit vehicles. While building a new schedule, either by hand or by converting existing data, error often happens which result in non-running simulations. In order to ease the creation of transit schedules, a tool to validate schedules is available which checks for common mistakes and gives detailed informations, if a schedule fails validation.

Running the Transit Schedule Validator

Currently (MATSim 0.8.x), it's only possible to run the Transit Schedule Validator from the command line. (We plan to integrate the validator into the MATSim GUI for the next version.)

To run the validator, you need to start MATSim on the console with the following arguments:

java -Xmx500m -cp matsim-0.8.0.jar org.matsim.pt.utils.TransitScheduleValidator path/to/myTransitSchedule.xml path/to/myNetwork.xml

The network file is optional, but strongly recommended, as more checks can be run if the network is given.

After the validator ran, it will either output a message stating that the schedule appears valid, or it will list found problems. Such problems could be:

  • A specified network route is not a complete route, i.e. not every link is connected by a common node to the next link in the route.
  • A transit stop referred in a route is not linked to a link in the network route.
  • A transit stop along a route has an earlier departure offset than a previous stop on the same route, or is missing a departure offset at all.