Modeling collective human mobility: Understanding exponential law of intra-urban movement

摘要

It is very important to understand urban mobility patterns because most tripsare concentrated in urban areas. In the paper, a new model is proposed to modelcollective human mobility in urban areas. The model can be applied to predictindividual flows not only in intra-city but also in countries or a largerrange. Based on the model, it can be concluded that the exponential law ofdistance distribution is attributed to decreasing exponentially of averagedensity of human travel demands. Since the distribution of human travel demandsonly depends on urban planning, population distribution, regional functions andso on, it illustrates that these inherent properties of cities are impetus todrive collective human movements.