Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 10, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11841-2
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Conselleria d'Innovacio, Recerca i Turisme of the Government of the Balearic Islands
- European Social Fund
- Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities
- National Agency for Research Funding AEI
- FEDER (EU) [FIS2015-63628-C2-1-R, FIS2015-63628-C2-2-R, RTI2018-093732-B-C22]
- Maria de Maeztu program for Units of Excellence in RD [MDM-2017-0711]
- French National Research Agency [ANR-17-CE03-0003]
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) [ANR-17-CE03-0003] Funding Source: Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Understanding human mobility is crucial for applications such as forecasting epidemic spreading, planning transport infrastructure and urbanism in general. While, traditionally, mobility information has been collected via surveys, the pervasive adoption of mobile technologies has brought a wealth of (real time) data. The easy access to this information opens the door to study theoretical questions so far unexplored. In this work, we show for a series of worldwide cities that commuting daily flows can be mapped into a well behaved vector field, fulfilling the divergence theorem and which is, besides, irrotational. This property allows us to define a potential for the field that can become a major instrument to determine separate mobility basins and discern contiguous urban areas. We also show that empirical fluxes and potentials can be well reproduced and analytically characterized using the so-called gravity model, while other models based on intervening opportunities have serious difficulties.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available