TOWARDS A STATISTICAL PHYSICS OF HUMAN MOBILITY

Gallotti Riccardo, Bazzani Armando () and Rambaldi Sandro
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Gallotti Riccardo: Department of Physics, University of Bologna and INFN Bologna, via Irnerio 46, 40126 Bologna, Italy
Bazzani Armando: Department of Physics, University of Bologna and INFN Bologna, via Irnerio 46, 40126 Bologna, Italy
Rambaldi Sandro: Department of Physics, University of Bologna and INFN Bologna, via Irnerio 46, 40126 Bologna, Italy

International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC), 2012, vol. 23, issue 09, 1-16

Abstract: In this paper, we extend some ideas of statistical physics to describe the properties of human mobility. From a physical point of view, we consider the statistical empirical laws of private cars mobility, taking advantage of a GPS database which contains a sampling of the individual trajectories of 2% of the whole vehicle population in an Italian region. Our aim is to discover possible "universal laws" that can be related to the dynamical cognitive features of individuals. Analyzing the empirical trip length distribution we study if the travel time can be used as universal cost function in a mesoscopic model of mobility. We discuss the implications of the elapsed times distribution between successive trips that shows an underlying Benford's law, and we study the rank distribution of the average visitation frequency to understand how people organize their daily agenda. We also propose simple stochastic models to suggest possible explanations of the empirical observations and we compare our results with analogous results on statistical properties of human mobility presented in the literature.

Keywords: Statistical physics; human mobility; GPS data; power-law distribution; 11.25.Hf; 123.1K (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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DOI: 10.1142/S0129183112500611

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