Complex networks analysis of commuting: Recent advances and a research agenda

Abstract

The emerging new science of networks is providing an elegant paradigm for the characterization of the broad area of complex systems. New research perspectives have been opened in the study of many real phenomena and processes, and recently fields like urban, regional, and environmental sciences have gained new insights from the tools provided by network science. The complex networks analysis (CNA) becomes a useful framework in these fields to disentangle problems of a complex and unpredictable nature. At the end of the last millennium, the availability of large data sets and the parallel explosion of computer processing power have made a systematic and intensive application of CNA to the study of very large networks(Pastor-Satorras and Vespignani 2004; Albert and Barabási 2002) possible. According to CNA, complex behaviours are signalled by the emergence of some characteristics that can be featured in terms of statistical properties.