Networks and Cities: An Information Perspective

TL;DR

This paper introduces an information-centric approach to urban traffic analysis by mapping city road networks into information networks, enabling quantification of the information needed to locate addresses and revealing complex network properties.

Contribution

It presents a novel method of representing city road maps as information networks, highlighting their complex degree distributions and providing a new perspective on traffic constrained by information.

Findings

City road networks exhibit broad degree distributions similar to other complex networks.

Mapping roads to nodes and intersections to links allows quantification of address location information.

The information perspective offers new insights into traffic constraints related to information handling.

Abstract

Traffic is constrained by the information involved in locating the receiver and the physical distance between sender and receiver. We here focus on the former, and investigate traffic in the perspective of information handling. We re-plot the road map of cities in terms of the information needed to locate specific addresses and create information city networks with roads mapped to nodes and intersections to links between nodes. These networks have the broad degree distribution found in many other complex networks. The mapping to an information city network makes it possible to quantify the information associated with locating specific addresses.