Models of Geospatially Referenced People Distribution as a Basis for Studying the Daily Cycles of Urban Infrastructure Use by Residents

Abstract

Highlights: What are the main findings? Data from statistics on demographics and professional specialization of the city’s population, combined with data on the composition of the urban infrastructure, make it possible to obtain a model of the distribution of people with a spatial–temporal reference. The model of people placement in the city can reflect both the general hourly load of the territory and individual infrastructure facilities and the specifics of their use in terms of the types of activities produced. What is the implication of the main finding? The proposed approach to modeling the placement of people in the city allows for combining and analyzing data of varying detail to take into account the features of the daily functioning of both individual environmental objects and complex infrastructure systems. The presence of a customizable and updatable model of population distribution in the city will allow it to be integrated into the environment of common data of smart city services and to configure the operating modes of individual infrastructure facilities in accordance with the predicted load. City services and infrastructures are focused on consumers and are able to effectively and qualitatively implement their functions only under conditions of normal workload. In this regard, the correct organization of a public service system is directly related to the knowledge of the quantitative and qualitative composition of people in the city during the day. The article discusses existing solutions for analyzing the distribution of people in a territory based on data collected by mobile operators, payment terminals, navigation systems and other network solutions, as well as the modeling methods derived from them. The scientific aim of the study is to propose a solution for modeling the daily distribution of people based on open statistics collected from the Internet and open-web mapping data. The stages of development of the modeling software environment and the methods for spatial analysis of available data on a digital cartographic basis are described. The proposed approach includes the use of archetypes of social groups, occupational statistics, gender and age composition of a certain territory, as well as the characteristics of urban infrastructure objects in terms of composition and purpose. Solutions for modeling the 48 h distribution of city residents with reference to certain infrastructure facilities (residential, public and working) during working and weekend days with an hourly breakdown of the simulated values were created as a result of the study. A simulation of the daily distribution of people in the city was carried out using the example of the city of Volgograd, Russian Federation. A picture of the daily distribution of city residents by district and specific buildings of the city was obtained as a result of the modeling. The proposed approach and the created algorithm can be applied to any city.