Viriato is mainly used for strategic planning purposes, i.e. adapting infrastructure to future service concepts and coordinating several operators or products sharing the same infrastructure. Planning regular interval trains is a main concern, but there are also options for analyzing single trains, e.g. freight freeways.
Railway rolling stock is expensive to own and operate, therefore, to be successful, train operators must use their vehicles as efficiently as possible. Viriato enables planners to integrate vehicle planning directly into all levels of the timetable design process.
Railway networks include lots of information: Lengths of section tracks, sizes of stations, distances, travelling times, numbers of trains, lines, numbers of passengers, numbers of transit passengers, frequencies of trains, delays, train categories and many more.
A schematic map is a good idea whenever this information has to be displayed. Without a special software it would require a huge effort to create such a map.
SMA und Partner AG developed Netvisio, a software that allows to create or import schematic maps quickly and easily.
A line net of public transport in a large city rapidly gets very complex and hardly understandable by passengers. In 1933 the engineer and designer Harry Beck knew about this problem when he designed the map of the London Underground network. He developed a few simple rules to get a well-arranged line net map.
The most important rule is that every element, especially lines has to be horizontal, vertical or as a diagonal of 45 degrees. His design serves still as a prototype for many line net maps around the world.
