Scaling law of individual urban tour behavior

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Authors: Xu-Jie Lin, Yitao Yang, Wei‐Peng Nie, Xiao-Yong Yan
Cited by: 0
References: 36

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.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing Transportation Planning and Optimization

Publication details

Journal / source
Physical review. E
Volume
113
Issue
3
Pages
034303–034303
Publication date
5 February 2026
Language
EN