A Survey of Human Mobility Models

Abstract

Human mobility models are key components of various research fields including transportation, mobile networks, disaster management, urban planning, and epidemic modeling. Understanding human mobility has a major role in the realistic evaluation of new approaches to challenges in these fields. For the perspective of networked systems, simulations of the networks with human participants such as opportunistic social networks are highly dependent on human mobility. In this article, we summarize the state of the art for scientific research on human mobility and survey the currently used human mobility models. We discuss the commonly used metrics and data collection techniques. Furthermore, we include a taxonomy of the mobility models according to their main characteristics and classify them. We lastly discuss the general trends, applicability, further research directions and open problems of human mobility modeling.