Applications of Urban Computing for Mobility Analysis

Abstract

Cities are complex systems where space is a sparse resource and a large variety of processes work in parallel: Housing, human mobility, public administration, supply chains, energy supply, etc. An important aspect for many of these topics is an efficient transportation network. In 2018, the research group Geoinformation at TU Wien started to systematically develop tools to analyse such a network based on urban computing. One of the first results was the intersections framework, an OpenStreetMap-based platform to obtain localized statistical information about traffic networks. This framework and more sophisticated tools have been used throughout the last years as a basis for different studies like the analysis of pedestrian wayfinding or the reachability of a location by different modes of transportation, the search for comparable areas in different cities to replicate wayfinding studies, or the prediction of apartment prices. The paper discusses applications, challenges, and benefits. It concludes with the need for a flexible data processing pipeline that can handle various types of input data.