Modeling collective human mobility: Understanding exponential law of intra-urban movement

law of intra-urban movement Xiao Liang,∗ Jichang Zhao,† Li Dong,‡ and Ke Xu§ State Key Lab of Software Development Environment, Beihang University Abstract It is very important to understand urban mobility patterns because most trips are concentrated in urban areas. In the paper, a new model is proposed to model collective human mobility in urban areas. The model can be applied to predict individual flows not only in intra-city but also in countries or a larger range. Based on the model, it can be concluded that the exponential law of distance distribution is attributed to decreasing exponentially of average density of human travel demands. Since the distribution of human travel demands only depends on urban planning, population distribution, regional functions and so on, it illustrates that these inherent properties of cities are impetus to drive collective human movements.