Human Mobility: Models and Applications

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent models and methods for understanding human mobility patterns using geolocated data, highlighting their applications in urban planning, traffic, and epidemic modeling.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of modeling approaches for individual and population mobility, integrating theory with real-world applications.

Findings

Different modeling techniques for short- and long-range mobility

Applications in traffic forecasting and epidemic modeling

Frameworks for analyzing individual and collective movement patterns

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of extensive geolocated datasets related to human movement, enabling scientists to quantitatively study individual and collective mobility patterns, and to generate models that can capture and reproduce the spatiotemporal structures and regularities in human trajectories. The study of human mobility is especially important for applications such as estimating migratory flows, traffic forecasting, urban planning, and epidemic modeling. In this survey, we review the approaches developed to reproduce various mobility patterns, with the main focus on recent developments. This review can be used both as an introduction to the fundamental modeling principles of human mobility, and as a collection of technical methods applicable to specific mobility-related problems. The review organizes the subject by differentiating between individual and population mobility and also between short-range and long-range mobility. Throughout the text the description of the theory is intertwined with real-world applications.