Structure and evolution of urban heavy truck mobility networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the structure and evolution of urban heavy truck mobility networks using GPS data, revealing their properties and proposing a model that captures their development, with implications for urban freight management and other network systems.

Contribution

It introduces a new evolving network model considering weight, space, and duplication, accurately reproducing the properties of UHTMN and offering insights into its evolution.

Findings

The UHTMN exhibits distinct structural properties.

The proposed model successfully replicates observed network features.

Insights into the evolutionary mechanisms of urban freight networks.

Abstract

Revealing the structural properties and understanding the evolutionary mechanisms of the urban heavy truck mobility network (UHTMN) provide insights in assessment of freight policies to manage and regulate the urban freight system, and are of vital importance for improving the livability and sustainability of cities. Although massive urban heavy truck mobility data become available in recent years, in-depth studies on the structure and evolution of UHTMN are still lacking. Here we use massive urban heavy truck GPS data in China to construct the UHTMN and reveal its a wide range of structure properties. We further develop an evolving network model that simultaneously considers weight, space and system element duplication. Our model reproduces the observed structure properties of UHTMN and helps us understand its underlying evolutionary mechanisms. Our model also provides new perspectives for modeling the evolution of many other real-world networks, such as protein interaction networks, citation networks and air transportation networks.