Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting, and the
spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws
governing human motion remains limited thanks to the lack of tools to monitor
the time resolved location of individuals. Here we study the trajectory of
100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six month
period. We find that in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the
prevailing Levy flight and random walk models, human trajectories show a high
degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized
by a time independent characteristic length scale and a significant probability
to return to a few highly frequented locations. After correcting for
differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory,
the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability
distribution, indicating that despite the diversity of their travel history,
humans follow simple reproducible patterns. This inherent similarity in travel
patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic
prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent based modeling.

通过追踪 100,000 个匿名移动电话用户 6 个月的位置，发现人类运动的行为规律性，即每个人都具有一个时间无关特征尺度，并有极高的概率返回特定位置，这种旅行模式可与单一的空间概率分布相一致，这对城市规划、疫情预防和紧急响应等方面有重要的影响。