Toward a General Understanding of the Scaling Laws in Human and Animal Mobility

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified model explaining the different scaling exponents in human and animal mobility by considering a home-return constraint that maximizes visiting diversity under a total travel distance limit.

Contribution

It introduces a general optimization model where a random walker with power-law distributed step lengths explains the variation in mobility scaling exponents.

Findings

Optimal exponents between 1 and 2 emerge naturally.

Discrepancies in scaling exponents are due to home-return constraints.

The model unifies understanding of mobility patterns across species.

Abstract

Recent research highlighted the scaling property of human and animal mobility. An interesting issue is that the exponents of scaling law for animals and humans in different situations are quite different. This paper proposes a general optimization model, a random walker following scaling laws (whose traveling distances in each step obey a power law distribution with exponent {\alpha}) tries to diversify its visiting places under a given total traveling distance with a home-return probability. The results show that different optimal exponents in between 1 and 2 can emerge naturally. Therefore, the scaling property of human and animal mobility can be understood in our framework where the discrepancy of the scaling law exponents is due to the home-return constraint under the maximization of the visiting places diversity.