Preparing a network

Preparing a link network to be imported into an AequilibraE project consists of ensuring that all fields necessary for network import exist and are properly filled. These fields are :

  • link_id

  • a_node

  • b_node

  • direction

  • distance

  • modes

  • link_type

Below we give some directions on how to prepare each field.

Network articulation

The association of a_nodes and b_nodes to a link layer is what can be named articulation of a network, and is one of the foundational tools in AequilibraE. There are two distinct situations that need to be covered:

User has only the network links

This is the case when one exports only links from a transportation package or downloads a link layer from Open Street Maps or a government open data portal and want to use such network for path computation. This tool then does the following:

  • Duplicates the pre-existing network in order to edit it without risk of data corruption

  • Creates nodes at the extremities of all links in the network (no duplicate nodes at the same lat/long)

  • Adds the fields A_Node and B_Node to the new link layer, and populate them with the IDs generated for the nodes layer

User has the network links and nodes but no database field linking them

In case one has both the complete sets of nodes and links and nodes for a certain network (commercial packages would allow you to export them separately), you can use this tool to associate those links and nodes (if that information was not exported from the package). In that case, the steps would be the following:

  • Duplicates the pre-existing network in order to edit it without risk of data corruption

  • Checks if the nodes provided cover both extremities of all links from the layer provided. Node IDs are also checked for uniqueness

  • Adds the fields A_Node and B_Node to the new link layer, and populate them with the IDs chosen among the fields from the nodes layer

GUI

The tool can be accessed in the AequilibraE menu AequilibraE > Network Manipulation > Network Preparation , and it looks like this:

Network preparation

In this case we chose to add nodes with IDs starting in 1,001, as we will reserve all nodes from 1 to 1,000 for centroids, external stations and other special uses (we are not planning to use all that range and that is not necessary, but the numbering gets quite neat that way).

It is important to note that AequilibraE understands a_node as being the topologically first point of the line, and b_node the last. Topology in GIS involves a LOT of stuff, but you can look at an intro

If you prefer a video tutorial, you can access

Direction

Links need to have directionality associated to them because links can be bi-directional in AequilibraE, which is not the case for several of the commercial platforms in the market. For this reason, one needs to have a field for link direction with values in the set [-1, 0, 1], where:

  • If direction = -1, then we the link allows BA flow only

  • If direction = 0, then we the link allows flows in both directions

  • If direction = 1, then we the link allows AB flow only

Distance

The field for distance needs to be numeric, but its value is currently unimportant, as distance values will be overwritten with distance in meters by SpatiaLite. Other units will be possible in the future.

Modes

In AequilibraE, each mode is represented by a lower case letter. So imagine we will have several modes in our network, such as cars (c), trucks (t), bicycles (b) and walking (w). In that case, a link that allows all modes will have a modes field equal to ctbw (the order of modes is irrelevant), while a link that allows bikes and pedestrians would have a modes string equal to bw.

The list of modes that will exist in the model, however, comes from the parameter list built into AequilibraE under the section Network–>*modes*.

To find out how to access the parameters file see documentation on the Global parameters.