Revealing Process Structure in Urban Mobility Networks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how process mining applied to urban mobility data can uncover detailed flow patterns, durations, and mode-specific behaviors, enhancing understanding of city transportation systems.

Contribution

It introduces a reproducible pipeline for transforming CDR data into process models and highlights the benefits of object-centric analysis for multimodal mobility insights.

Findings

Most trips are intra-municipal

Inter-municipal flows connect neighboring areas

Mode-specific durations differ significantly

Abstract

Urban mobility is a multi-entity system that involves travelers, transport modes, and infrastructure. Beyond conventional origin/destination analysis, this paper investigates how process mining can structure and interpret mobility behavior from event data. Using Call Detail Records (CDRs) from Oeiras in the Lisbon metropolitan area (Portugal), we construct both case-centric and object-centric event logs and discover models that summarize flows and typical durations. Results show that most trips are intra-municipal, while inter-municipal flows connect strongly to neighboring areas, with typical inter-parish travel times of about 20 minutes. The object-centric perspective explicitly links trips and transport modes, revealing mode-specific duration differences (e.g., bus vs. car) that inform multimodal planning. Our contributions are: (i) a reproducible pipeline to transform CDRs into process mining artifacts, (ii) empirical evidence that mobility data exhibit a process-like structure, and (iii) the added value of object-centric models for multimodal analysis. Limitations include the low spatial precision of CDRs (tower-sector level) and heuristic transport-mode labels. Future work will integrate transport-network context (e.g., stations and routes) and model object-centric logs as heterogeneous graphs to enable richer and more reliable analysis.