Understanding and Modeling Human Movement in Cities Using Phone Data

Cities today are strained by the exponential growth in population where they are homes to the majority of world's population. Understanding the complexities underlying the emerging behaviors of human travel patterns on the city level is essential toward making informed decision-making pertaining to urban transportation infrastructures This thesis includes several attempts towards modeling and understanding human mobility at the scales of individuals and the scale of aggregate population movement. The second chapter includes the development of a browser delivering visual insights of the aggregate behavior of populations in cities. The third chapter provides a computational framework for clustering regions in cities based on their attraction behavior and in doing so aids a predictive model in predicting inflows to newly developed regions. The fourth chapter investigates the patterns of individuals' movement at the city scale towards developing a predictive model for a persons' next visited location. The predictive accuracy is then increased by adding movement information of the population. The motivation behind the work of this thesis is derived from the demand of tools that provides fine-grained analysis of the complexity of human travel within cites. The approach takes advantage of the existing built infrastructures to sense the mobility of people eliminating the financial and temporal burdens of traditional methods. The outcomes of this work will assist both planners and the public in understanding the complexities of human mobility within their cities. Thesis Supervisor: Marta C. Gonzalez Title: Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering Thesis Supervisor: Una-May O'Reilly Title: Principal Research Scientist, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab