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.
Climate change and human mobility will shape dengue emergence risk in Europe
University of Padua（帕多瓦大学）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sez. Padova（意大利国家核物理研究所帕多瓦分部）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sez. Milano Bicocca（意大利国家核物理研究所米兰比科卡分部）；University of Parma（帕尔马大学）；Padova Neuroscience Center, University of Padua（帕多瓦大学帕多瓦神经科学中心）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；Machine Learning Genoa Center, University of Genoa（热那亚大学机器学习热那亚中心）；Padua Center for Network Medicine, University of Padua（帕多瓦大学帕多瓦网络医学中心）
