Understanding Urban Human Mobility through Crowdsensed Data

Abstract

Understanding how people move in the urban area is important for solving urbanization issues, such as traffic management, urban planning, epidemic control, and communication network improvement. Leveraging recent availability of large amounts of diverse crowdsensed data, many studies have made contributions to this field in various aspects. They need proper review and summary. In this article, therefore, we first review these recent studies with a proper taxonomy with corresponding examples. Then, based on the experience learned from the studies, we provide a comprehensive tutorial for future research, which introduces and discusses popular crowdsensed data types, different human mobility subjects, and common data preprocessing and analysis methods. Special emphasis is placed on the matching between data types and mobility subjects. Finally, we present two research projects as case studies to demonstrate the entire process of understanding urban human mobility through crowdsensed data on a city-wide scale and a building-wide scale, respectively. Beyond demonstration purposes, the two case studies also make contributions to their category of certain crowdsensed data types and mobility subjects.