In The Works

The developments for the upcoming release 5.0 are well under way. To satisfy your curiosity, here some of the enhancements which have recently been left the development bench and are currently being tested. Those of you who attended the Toronto Users' Conference can recognize that some of the suggestions brought to our attention there have already been implemented.

• Up to 6-digit node numbers. The old limitation of 4-digit node numbers will soon be part of the past. In order to optimize the graphic rendering, the user can now chose between 4-, 5- and 6-digit node numbers. With this enhancements, many hierarchical node numbering schemes can now be used directly in EMME/2. Also, this will make it possible to move to even larger size EMME/2 systems, since the limitation to a maximum of 10000 nodes (which was implicitly forced by the 4-digit node numbers) no longer exists.
• Batch entry files can now contain comment lines. These comment lines are identified by a "c" in the first column.
• User data fields can now be defined at the transit segment (or stop) level. In accordance to the naming of the other user fields, the three optional user segment data items are named US1, US2 and US3.
• Switch number 11 (no echo on batch entry) is now supported in modules 2.21 and 2.31.
• The transit line definition format was enhanced to allow the automatic shortest path computations to be controlled by the user. This is done via a new optional clause "path=<yes|no>" in the itinerary section of the line definition.
• A new module parameter has been added to module 2.24, which now makes it possible to punch only one transit line segment on each output record.

A partial release update is currently being field tested at some selected beta-test sites. It contains some of the already announced additions, such as the systematic mode modifications in 2.41, customized plot titles, conditional annotations and the 6-digit node numbers.