Toward a Universal Understanding of the Scaling Laws in Human and Animal Mobility

Abstract. Recent research highlighted the scaling property of human and animal mobility. An interesting issue is that the exponents of scaling law for animals and human in different situations are quite different. This paper proposes a universal optimization model, a random walker following scaling laws (whose traveling distances in each step follow a power law distribution with exponent α) tries to diversify its visiting places under given total traveling distance with a home return probability. The results show that different optimal exponents in between 1 and 2 can emerge naturally. Therefore, the scaling property of human and animal mobility can be understood in our universal framework in which the discrepancy of the scaling law exponents is due to the home return constraint under the maximizing visiting places diversity.