Abstract
Human mobility in an urban area is complicated; the origins, destinations, and transport methods of each person differ. The quantitative description of urban human mobility has recently attracted the attention of researchers, and it highly related to urban science problems. Herein, combined with physics inspiration, we introduce a revised electric circuit model (RECM) in which moving people are regarded as charged particles and analogical concepts of electromagnetism such as human conductivity and human potential enable us to capture the characteristics of urban human mobility. We introduce system of unit, secure the uniqueness for the calculation result, and reduce the computational cost of the algorithm to 1/10000 compared to the original ECM, making the model more universal and easier to be deploy. We compared features in the model including human conductivity and potential between different cities in Japan to show our improvement of the universality and the application range of the model. Furthermore, based on inspiration of physics, we propose a route generation model (RGM) to simulate a human flow pattern that automatically determines suitable routes between a given origin and destination as a source and sink, respectively. These discoveries are expected to lead to new approaches to the solution of urban science problems.
