FAQs about
PTV Visum

PTV Visum is the world’s leading software for multimodal transportation planning and macroscopic traffic modeling, trusted by cities and agencies worldwide. 

It integrates road, public transport, cycling, and walking in a single platform, enabling planners to design strategies that balance mobility, accessibility, and sustainability. 

With robust demand forecasting and advanced assignment methods, including equilibrium and Simulation-Based Assignment, PTV Visum produces realistic, citywide forecasts that help decision-makers test future scenarios and prioritize investments. 

By combining scale, accuracy, and multimodal depth, it empowers leaders to make confident, evidence-based mobility decisions.

Public authorities and ministries rely on PTV Visum for regional planning, policy evaluation, and infrastructure investment decisions. Cities and municipalities use it to design multimodal mobility strategies that balance efficiency, accessibility, and sustainability. 

Public transport operators,  agencies and major rail operators apply PTV Visum to optimize networks, services, and timetables, while consulting firms and engineering companies use it to deliver evidence-based studies for their clients. 

Beyond practice, universities and research institutions also employ PTV Visum for teaching and advancing transport modeling methods.

City governments increasingly rely on digital twins built with PTV Visum to make mobility planning more evidence-driven and resilient. By creating a virtual replica of the transport system, planners can integrate road, public transport, cycling, and walking into one coherent model that mirrors reality. 

This digital twin becomes the testbed for evaluating infrastructure projects, new mobility services, and policy measures before implementation, reducing risks and costs. 

With scenario-based forecasting and advanced assignment methods, decision-makers can explore “what-if” questions, measure impacts on congestion, emissions, and accessibility, and adjust strategies with confidence. By linking the digital twin to live or regularly updated data, cities also keep their models current, enabling continuous planning rather than one-off studies.

PTV Visum stands out as the best tool for urban mobility planning and optimization because it combines scale, precision, and multimodal depth in a single platform. It enables planners to analyze entire cities, covering road networks, public transport, cycling, and walking with one consistent model. 

With powerful demand forecasting and advanced assignment methods, including Simulation-Based Assignment (SBA), PTV Visum produces forecasts that reflect real-world dynamics such as congestion, queues, and multimodal interactions. Its scenario management lets decision-makers compare future options transparently and identify strategies that optimize efficiency, sustainability, and accessibility. 

By uniting strategic planning and operational detail in one system, PTV Visum empowers cities to make confident, evidence-based choices that improve urban mobility today and prepare for the challenges of tomorrow.

Yes, PTV Visum is built to serve both the public sector and the private sector, making it a uniquely versatile platform. Government authorities, cities, and regional agencies use it to evaluate infrastructure investments, design policies, and build long-term mobility strategies. 

At the same time, consultancies, engineering firms, and private operators rely on PTV Visum to deliver robust traffic studies, feasibility analyses, and optimized service designs for their clients. 

Because the software integrates multimodal planning, demand forecasting, and powerful scenario management, it provides a consistent, evidence-based framework that supports decision-making across all types of organizations, whether public or private.

Consultants use PTV Visum to create detailed, data-driven scenarios that test how new infrastructure such as roads, bridges, rail lines, or interchanges will change travel behavior and network performance. 

They begin with calibrated baseline models of current demand and traffic conditions, then introduce the planned infrastructure as a new scenario version. Using PTV Visum’s demand forecasting and advanced assignment methods (including Simulation-Based Assignment for realistic congestion and queuing), they evaluate how the project alters flows, travel times, accessibility, and modal shifts across the entire network. 

The results can be compared directly against the baseline and other alternatives, allowing consultants to quantify benefits, highlight risks, and provide decision-makers with clear evidence on whether and how to invest.

Yes, PTV Visum is built to support collaboration across teams, organizations, and stakeholders. Through PTV Hub, planners can store models centrally, share scenarios securely, and ensure all project partners are working on the latest version of the network and demand data. This cloud-based access makes it easier for multiple contributors, from city agencies to consultants to collaborate without version conflicts or data silos. 

Combined with PTV Visum’s scenario management and transparent reporting, teams can compare alternatives side-by-side, align on evidence-based decisions, and communicate results clearly to both technical experts and decision-makers. This collaborative environment helps accelerate consensus and ensures that complex transport strategies are developed in a coordinated, future-ready way.

Yes. PTV Visum scales seamlessly to national networks, handling road, rail, freight, and public transport in one model. It supports governments in forecasting demand, testing policy measures, and evaluating infrastructure investments across entire countries.

PTV Visum's high performance data models and algorithms allow to build transport models at a national scale with highest levels of detail and segmentation.

Yes, PTV Visum and PTV Vissim are complementary tools that together cover large-scale city simulations at different levels of detail. 

PTV Visum handles the macroscopic scale, efficiently modeling multimodal demand and traffic patterns across entire metropolitan regions. This allows planners to forecast flows, test strategies, and evaluate infrastructure investments consistently across modes and scenarios. 

PTV Vissim, on the other hand, provides the microscopic level of detail, simulating the interactions of individual vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians. 

For large cities, the two tools can be connected: PTV Visum supplies demand and strategic context, while PTV Vissim delivers detailed operational analyses at corridors or junctions. 

Yes, recent case studies show PTV Visum in action worldwide. From evacuation planning in the U.S., to MaaS evaluation in Lisbon, public transport integration in Portland, and urban ring road design in Sofia, PTV Visum provides the evidence base for better mobility decisions. These projects highlight its versatility across contexts and its value in delivering reliable, scenario-driven forecasts for real-world challenges. 

You can find the latest PTV Visum success stories here.

Emerging smart cities need tools that integrate diverse data, support multimodal planning, and enable evidence-based decision-making. Solutions like PTV Visum provide a digital twin of the mobility system, combining traffic, public transport, cycling, and walking in one consistent model. 

By connecting with live or regularly updated data sources, these platforms allow planners to monitor system performance and simulate the impact of new technologies such as shared mobility, low-emission zones, or autonomous vehicles. 

Scenario-based forecasting helps city leaders evaluate policies and infrastructure investments transparently, while cloud-based collaboration ensures stakeholders align on a shared vision. In this way, software solutions transform complex mobility challenges into actionable, future-ready strategies for smart cities.

PTV Visum provides a comprehensive framework for public transport (PT) planning by integrating all modes bus, rail, tram, metro into a single multimodal model. Planners can design and optimize networks, timetables, and line concepts, and directly test how service changes affect passenger flows, waiting times, and accessibility. 

With powerful assignment methods like frequency-based and capacity-constrained modeling, PTV Visum captures realistic passenger behavior such as route choice, transfers, and crowding effects. Scenario management enables agencies to evaluate alternatives from new lines to service adjustments while ensuring decisions are based on transparent, evidence-backed forecasts. This helps cities and operators improve efficiency, service quality, and long-term sustainability of their transit systems.

PTV Visum supports importing PT networks from a range of industry standard formats (GTFS, HAFAS, railML, VDV452) and to merge the with other data. 
It includes a variety of powerful graphical tools familiar to Public Transport planners, like a Graphical time table editor, an interactive Schematic Line Diagram, sophisticated line blocking / vehicle scheduling algorithms including electric busses & charging consideration, a Line block editor plus many more.

PTV Lines and PTV Visum are complementary tools, but they serve different purposes in the public transport planning process. 

PTV Lines is designed for the tactical level: it helps planners develop, compare, and optimize line concepts and timetables quickly, with a strong focus on operational efficiency and passenger experience. It is ideal for agencies or operators looking to test service scenarios and fine-tune networks interactively.

PTV Visum, in contrast, works at the strategic level, where the goal is to integrate public transport into a multimodal, city- or region-wide model. It forecasts demand, evaluates interactions between modes, and assesses how service changes affect traffic flows, accessibility, and long-term mobility strategies. 

Organizations can use PTV Lines for detailed service design and then feed those results into PTV Visum for network-wide evaluation.

PTV Visum provides a complete toolkit for evaluating the performance and economics of public transport lines and networks. Planners can analyze key indicators such as passenger volumes, occupancy, travel times, and load factors along each line, route, or stop and for arbitrary areas (e.g. communities or PTA districts). 

With its built-in cost models, PTV Visum also calculates operating costs based on fleet size, mileage, and timetables helping operators measure efficiency and identify cost drivers. 

By combining performance and cost analysis in one model, planners can compare alternatives, optimize resource allocation, and strike the right balance between service quality and financial sustainability. PTV Visum also allows to model many types of fare systems and use the transportation model to assess expected revenues from passenger trips.

Transportation hubs such as stations, interchanges, or terminals are critical nodes in urban mobility, and modern platforms like PTV Visum provide the analytical backbone to plan and optimize them. 

With multimodal modeling, planners can simulate how and when passengers arrive, transfer, and depart across road, rail, bus, cycling, and walking. PTV Visum supports detailed catchment and accessibility analysis, helping identify how well a hub connects to its surrounding area. 

It also evaluates line loads, passenger flows, and transfer times, allowing planners to test design alternatives or service adjustments. Combined with cost and performance indicators, PTV Visum also highlights bottlenecks and opportunities to streamline hub operations.

PTV Visum includes integrated methodologies to estimate emissions and environmental impacts directly from traffic modeling results. Using calculated traffic volumes, speeds, and network performance, the software applies emission factor models (e.g., based on vehicle categories and speed-dependent functions) to derive outputs such as CO₂, NOx, and particulate matter.  

For this purpose, PTV Visum includes the actual emission factor inventories and vehicle fleet statistics and forecasts from the industry standard emission models HBEFA and COPERT. These factors can be aligned with international standards or local guidelines, making results adaptable to regional policies. 

By combining demand forecasting, assignment results, and emission models, PTV Visum enables planners to test how infrastructure projects, policies, or modal shifts affect environmental outcomes across entire networks. This helps decision-makers evaluate strategies not just on mobility, but also on their contribution to sustainability and climate goals.

PTV Visum Safety is an extension of PTV Visum that focuses on road safety analysis within transport planning. It allows planners to identify and evaluate safety risks in a network by integrating crash prediction models with macroscopic transport data. 

By linking traffic volumes, speeds, and infrastructure characteristics, it estimates the expected number and severity of crashes for different scenarios. Planners can use it to compare the safety impacts of infrastructure projects, policy measures, or demand changes alongside traditional mobility indicators like travel times and congestion. 

This provides a holistic assessment framework where safety outcomes are considered early in the planning process, helping authorities and consultants design transport systems that are not only efficient but also safer.

Cities use platforms like PTV Visum to design transport strategies that balance mobility with environmental and social goals. By integrating road, public transport, cycling, and walking into one model, they can evaluate policies such as low-emission zones, electrification, or new transit lines in terms of both accessibility and carbon reduction. 

With scenario-based forecasting, municipalities compare alternatives transparently, ensuring investments align with long-term sustainability targets. The ability to combine emission analysis, equity metrics, and multimodal demand forecasting in one platform allows city leaders to make confident, evidence-based decisions that advance climate action, improve air quality, and enhance quality of life.

PTV Visum offers both static and dynamic traffic assignment methods. 

• On the static side, PTV Visum includes equilibrium assignment (variants such as Eq, LUCE, and BFW), incremental assignment, and stochastic assignment. It also provides specialized options like assignment with ICA (intersection-capacity aware), TRIBUT for toll-sensitive modeling, and a dedicated bicycle assignment tuned to cyclist preferences.
• For dynamic (time-dependent) analyses, PTV Visum supports Dynamic User Equilibrium (DUE) with spillback and time-varying capacities, Dynamic Stochastic Assignment (DSA) with time-slice and departure-time choice, and Simulation-Based Assignment (SBA), a mesoscopic vehicle-based approach that iterates to convergence and reproduces queue formation/dissolution.

In practice, you can use static equilibrium for fast strategic work and choose DUE/DSA when departure-time effects matter and pick SBA when you need realistic queues and node control effects.

Macroscopic traffic models represent traffic as aggregate flows (like fluids), ideal for large networks and strategic planning where speed and scalability matter more than vehicle-level detail. Typical outputs are link/turn volumes and travel times. This is where PTV Visum can be used. 

Microscopic traffic models simulate individual road users and their interactions (car-following, lane changing, signal control), producing detailed trajectories and realistic queue dynamics, best for operational analyses and corridor/junction design, usually on smaller networks due to computation resources needed. This is where PTV Vissim can be used.

PTV Visum provides two built-in procedures for OD matrix updating (ODME): TFlowFuzzy and Least squares. Both adjust a base matrix so assignment results match observed counts. TFlowFuzzy is PTV’s established matrix-correction approach, while Least squares minimizes squared differences to counts and to the original matrix. The Least-squares method is available in static and dynamic variants, the dynamic form updates matrices per time slice based on dynamic counts. 

For demand estimation/generation, PTV Visum’s Matrix Editor includes a gravity model calculation and tools to manage, inspect, and process matrices before or alongside correction. These workflows can be combined with dynamic assignments where needed.

Modern modeling platforms like PTV Visum empower planners to optimize traffic flow by simulating network conditions and testing strategies before implementation. 

Key techniques include 

• Signal optimization, where cycle times, green splits, and offsets are adjusted for smoother progression along corridors
• Capacity management, by analyzing lane use, turn restrictions, and intersection layouts to identify bottlenecks
• Dynamic assignment methods, which model congestion, rerouting, and queue formation under different demand scenarios. 

Planners can also evaluate policy levers such as tolling, restricted zones, or priority lanes to redistribute traffic and encourage multimodal balance. By comparing alternatives transparently, software ensures that optimization measures deliver measurable improvements in efficiency, safety, and sustainability.

PTV Visum works with the formats most teams use to stand up and maintain models quickly. 

1. For base maps, you can create networks from OpenStreetMap (*.pbf, *.bz2), and read/write GIS layers via Shapefile and GeoJSON (GeoJSON must be RFC 7946; exporting Shapefile/GeoJSON requires the GIS add-on).
2. For public transport supply, PTV Visum imports GTFS, HAFAS, and railML, and can export/handle VDV 452. There’s also a workflow to save a network as Google Transit Feed (GTFS).
3. Tabular and database exchange is covered by the attribute interface (read/write *.att and use CSV via spreadsheets) and options to save to / read from databases.
4. For enrichment and analysis, you can import elevation from GeoTIFF to add slopes and z-values.

In PTV Visum you automate work by building a procedure sequence, a chain of steps (e.g., open data, run assignments, save outputs) that you can start and let run unattended, even overnight. The same sequence can be applied across scenarios for consistent comparisons, and you can monitor execution from the Procedure sequence window. 

For scripting, PTV Visum provides a Python Console in the UI and a full COM API. You can embed scripts directly into a procedure sequence via the Run script step or as menu items providing interactive functionality. Furthermore, the COM-API allows PTV Visum operations to be automated and controlled by external processes/ scripts, allowing to embed PTV Visum in business workflows across multiple applications.

PTV Visum models mixed traffic by putting all modes in one integrated network and letting you control which transport systems (e.g., car, bus, bike) are permitted on each link and lane. That means 

• buses can share general-purpose lanes or use bus lanes
• bikes can ride in traffic or on separate facilities
• turns can be mode-specific.

Congestion and capacity effects are handled via volume-delay/capacity-restraint functions and lane choice logic. For public transport running in mixed traffic, PTV Visum reflects on-street conditions so shared lanes influence bus travel times.

For active modes, the bicycle assignment may account for motorized speed/volume when bikes run in mixed traffic. When time dynamics matter, dynamic assignments including Simulation-Based Assignment (SBA) capture queue formation and dissipation across modes using the same network.

In PTV Visum, scenario-based forecasting starts by placing your project under scenario management. You can keep a base version, derive scenario versions (e.g., network, demand, policy changes), and PTV Visum records differences as model transfer files so each scenario remains reproducible. 

You can then run the same procedure sequence, trip/demand calculations, assignments, skims, and outputs across multiple scenarios in one go, which is ideal for consistent forecasts and batch runs. 

Finally, you analyze and compare scenarios side-by-side, using version comparisons and global layouts to review KPIs (flows, speeds, travel times, accessibility) and pick the preferred plan. For demand-led forecasts, PTV Visum’s demand model (e.g., the standard four-step workflow) plugs straight into this process.

To access the latest version of PTV Visum, request a download via the official PTV Visum product page. Once the setup file is obtained, simply run the installer, select the required components (e.g., language packs, Python interface), and complete the installation. 

After installation, activate your license using the PTV License Manager or via the in-product Help → License option. Regular service packs and updates are published to ensure your software stays current, stable, and aligned with the latest features. Notifications about available ServicePacks are shown when starting the software.

PTV Visum runs on modern 64-bit Windows systems (Windows 11 or recent Server versions). At least 4 GB RAM is required, though 16–32 GB is recommended for larger models. You’ll need 2–5 GB disk space, a Full HD display, and a 3D-capable graphics card (OpenGL 3.0/DirectX 11). An internet connection is necessary for license activation and background maps.

You can find detailed information here.

PTV Visum offers three main license types: 

• single-user licenses tied to individual machines
• floating licenses managed on a server and shared by multiple users
• cloud-based subscriptions via PTV Hub for flexible, collaborative access. 

Floating licenses and cloud licenses allow borrowing of seats for temporary offline usage.

Yes, you can test PTV Visum for free. Submit the form on the trial page, you’ll receive an email with a link to download the latest version. The trial is largely full-featured but has a few limits (notably, COM interfaces are disabled and sessions are time-limited).

PTV Visum provides support through the PTV Visum “Downloads, Learn & Support” hub, which links self-learning materials with the helpdesk and FAQs. Additionally, the online manual for PTV Visum is available.

Other training opportunities:

Professional training for PTV Visum: PTV Trainings

PTV Visum Tutorials

Webinars: PTV Talks 

PTV organizes several user group meetings each year at different locations worldwide, offering direct interaction with PTV experts and other users. Further exchange takes place in the PTV Visum LinkedIn forum with over 5,000 members.

PTV Visum is a premium product that pays back by reducing project risks and enabling better, faster decisions. With powerful scenario-based forecasting, advanced methods like Simulation-Based Assignment, and integrated road and public transport modeling, it provides decision-makers with insights that mirror real-world conditions. 

Proven in cities worldwide, PTV Visum ensures investments are based on reliable evidence, not guesswork making it a trusted, future-ready foundation for mobility planning.