الگوی تحرک انسانها
Human Mobility Patterns
A study used personal cell phone signals to track the movements of 100,000 Europeans. ُAmong the findings: most people rarely leave the vicinity of their home or office, remain within a 20 mile radius, visit the same places, and are usually found in the same spot at the same time.
The study is published in Nature:Understanding individual human mobility patterns
27 March 2008
By Marta C. González, César A. Hidalgo & Albert-László Barabási
Full article available from Nature. Abstract here:
Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting and the spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited owing to the lack of tools to monitor the time-resolved location of individuals.
Here we study the trajectory of 100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six-month period.
We find that, in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Lévy flight and random walk models, human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations.
After correcting for differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory, the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns.
This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modelling.
Supplementary Material available as pdf, also as html.
Barabási (one of the authors) is famous for his insights on network theories and for trying to map the Web into four different continents: The Terra Incognita of the Web.
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