Month: December 2022

Our new paper entitled “Conserved quantities in human mobility: From locations to trips” was accepted at Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies and is now available online.

We use two high-resolution user-labelled datasets from ~3800 individuals to analyse individuals’ activity–travel behaviour over the long term. We find that individuals maintain a conserved quantity in the number of essential travel mode and activity location combinations over time. A typical individual maintains 15 mode–location combinations, of which 7 are travelled with a private vehicle every 5 weeks. The dynamics of this stability reveal that the exploration speed of locations is faster than the one for travel modes, and they can both be well-modelled using a power-law fit that slows down over time.

Our findings enrich the understanding of the long-term intra-person variability in activity–travel behaviour and open new possibilities for designing mobility simulation models.

Check out the open-access paper online!

Our new paper on “Graph based mobility profiling” was accepted at Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (CEUS) and is now available online. We propose a graph based workflow to identify groups of persons with similar mobility behavior based on person specific graphs that describe the mobility behavior. Our approach is privacy friendly, does not depend on a specific clustering algorithm, is robust against the choice of hyperparameters, does not require specific labels in the dataset, and is not limited to specific types of tracking data. We show in the paper how this can be used to evaluate the impact of new mobility offers.

The paper is open access and the source code of the project is available on our Github.