A movement model for air passengers based on trip purpose

The study of human mobility has contribution to understanding the law of human spatial movement and has obtained a lot of attention in recent years because of its applications in location-based social networks (LBSNs). The existing works mainly focus on analyzing the human movement on the ground due to the limitation of acquiring data. In addition, existing models ignore the influence of individuals' trip purpose on human movement. In this study, a novel movement model for air passengers based on trip purpose is proposed. There are two essential factors in the proposed model: (1) Trip purpose. We firstly verify the effects of trip purpose by analyzing air passengers' reservation records and then assume that the travel of air passengers is driven either by business purpose or tourism purpose. Based on the analysis of trip purpose, a method based on expected utility theory is proposed when calculating the probability of choosing airports for passengers. (2) Memory effect. In order to depict the movement characteristics of passengers, we take into full consideration the memory effect when determining whether or not to choose the candidate airports from historical airports or new airports which have not be visited before. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed movement model has obtained good performance on the individual as well as the population levels, and outperforms the state-of-the-art Gravity model and Radiation model. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.