title: Origin of the scaling law in human mobility: hierarchy of traffic systems.
abstract: Uncovering the mechanism leading to the scaling law in human trajectories is of fundamental importance in understanding many spatiotemporal phenomena. We propose a hierarchical geographical model to mimic the real traffic system, upon which a random walker will generate a power-law-like travel displacement distribution with tunable exponent, and display a scaling behavior in the probability density of having traveled a certain distance at a certain time. The simulation results, analytical results, and empirical observations reported in D. Brockmann et al. [Nature (London) 439, 462 (2006)] agree very well with each other.
authors.affiliation: Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Xiao-Pu
authors.initials: XP
authors.lastname: Han
authors.forename: Qiang
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Hao
authors.forename: Bing-Hong
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zhou
mesh_terms: D006802:Human Activities; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011336:Probability; D013997:Time Factors