Temporal patterns of emergency calls of a metropolitan city in China

Wenjun Wang, Ning Yuan, Lin Pan, Pengfei Jiao, Weidi Dai, Guixiang Xue and Dong Liu

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2015, vol. 436, issue C, 846-855

Abstract: Quantitative understanding of human communication behavior, one of the fundamental human activities, is of great value in many practical problems, ranging from urban planning to emergency management. Most of the recent studies have focused on human communication under normal situations. Here, we study the temporal patterns of emergency calls, which is a special kind of human communication activity under emergency circumstances, by analyzing a dataset of emergency call records that collected from a metropolitan city in China during a five year period. We find that most individuals rarely make emergency calls. The distribution of inter-call durations decays as double power law along with an exponential tail. We also discover that, comparing with the normal communication activities, the activity of calling the emergency number shows more significant characteristics of burstiness and memory. We further demonstrate that the behavior of calling the emergency number when people encounter extreme events could be explained by an event-driven memory process.

Keywords: Temporal pattern; Human communication; Emergency call; Inter-event time (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437115004434
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:436:y:2015:i:c:p:846-855

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2015.05.028

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().