Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Analyzing and modeling the mobility process with tour behavior is fundamental to understanding a wide range of complex systems, including animal foraging, human mobility, and freight transportation. However, despite their importance, the distribution of tour length has long been neglected in individual human mobility models. To fill this gap, we analyze Foursquare users' check-in data and find that the distribution of urban tour length follows a truncated power-law distribution. To reproduce the universal scaling law for human mobility in urban areas, we introduce a tour terminate-continue model. Our model reproduces not only the urban tour length distribution, but also Heaps' law, Zipf's law, and the distribution of the radius of gyration, providing an additional perspective for characterizing individual human mobility.
Source: Physical review. E
DOI: 10.1103/9d5z-9xxt
Authors: Xu-Jie Lin, Yitao Yang, Wei-Peng Nie, Xiao-Yong Yan
Institutions: Beijing Jiaotong University, University of Leeds
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G1798923567, G5059247373
OpenAlex ID: W4415036003