Network-Level Measures of Mobility from Aggregated Origin-Destination Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework for analyzing collective mobility patterns using aggregated origin-destination data, revealing how network structure influences large-scale movement without focusing on individual behavior.

Contribution

It introduces new measures for interpreting mobility system properties from aggregated data and validates them using synthetic and real-world datasets.

Findings

Measures reflect network organization and flow constraints

Metrics reveal large-scale spatial and temporal patterns

Effective despite data aggregation limitations

Abstract

We introduce a framework for defining and interpreting collective mobility measures from spatially and temporally aggregated origin--destination (OD) data. Rather than characterizing individual behavior, these measures describe properties of the mobility system itself: how network organization, spatial structure, and routing constraints shape and channel population movement. In this view, aggregate mobility flows reveal aspects of connectivity, functional organization, and large-scale daily activity patterns encoded in the underlying transport and spatial network. To support interpretation and provide a controlled reference for the proposed time-elapsed calculations, we first employ an independent, network-driven synthetic data generator in which trajectories arise from prescribed system structure rather than observed data. This controlled setting provides a concrete reference for understanding how the proposed measures reflect network organization and flow constraints. We then apply the measures to fully anonymized data from the NetMob 2024 Data Challenge, examining their behavior under realistic limitations of spatial and temporal aggregation. While such data constraints restrict dynamical resolution, the resulting metrics still exhibit interpretable large-scale structure and temporal variation at the city scale.