A Centre for Complexity Science seminar. The study of human mobility has a long history, and it has become a hot topic since the appearance of smartphones with Global Positioning Systems. Based on a novel idea of treating moving people as charged particles, we introduce a method to map macroscopic human flows into currents on an imaginary electric circuit network defined over a metropolitan area. High conductance areas are found to be along railroads and highways, and synchronized human flows in the morning and evening are well described by the temporal changes of electric potential. The standard deviation of the fluctuations of currents in this model is found to be roughly proportional to the conductivity, which coincides with the fluctuation-dissipation relation for materials.
Y. Shida, J. Ozaki, H. Takayasu and M. Takayasu. Potential fields and fluctuation-dissipation relations derived from human flow in urban areas modeled by a network of electric circuits. Sci Rep 12, 9918 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-13789-8
This is a hybrid event with a communal viewing in the Gabor seminar room, room 611, EEE building.