Mobility Viewer: An Eulerian Approach for Studying Urban Crowd Flow

Abstract

Studying human movement citywide is important for understanding mobility and transportation patterns. Rather than investigating the trajectories of individuals, we employ an Eulerian approach to analyze the crowd flows among a geographical network and a social network, which are extracted from mobile phone data. We design a suite of visualization techniques to illustrate the dynamic evolutions of the flow over the networks. We contribute the design and implementation of a visual analytics system, which is called Mobility Viewer, that supports situation-aware understanding and visual reasoning of human mobility. We exemplify our approach with a real citywide data set of seven million users in two months.