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Mobility Trajectories from Network-Driven Markov Dynamics

Published: January 9, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.06020v1

By: David A. Meyer, Asif Shakeel

Potential Business Impact:

Predicts how people move around cities.

Business Areas:
Travel Travel and Tourism

We present a generative model of human mobility in which trajectories arise as realizations of a prescribed, time-dependent Markov dynamics defined on a spatial interaction network. The model constructs a hierarchical routing structure with hubs, corridors, feeder paths, and metro links, and specifies transition matrices using gravity-type distance decay combined with externally imposed temporal schedules and directional biases. Population mass evolves as indistinguishable, memoryless movers performing a single transition per time step. When aggregated, the resulting trajectories reproduce structured origin-destination flows that reflect network geometry, temporal modulation, and connectivity constraints. By applying the Perron-Frobenius theorem to the daily evolution operator, we identify a unique periodic invariant population distribution that serves as a natural non-transient reference state. We verify consistency between trajectory-level realizations and multi-step Markov dynamics, showing that discrepancies are entirely attributable to finite-population sampling. The framework provides a network-centric, privacy-preserving approach to generating mobility trajectories and studying time-elapsed flow structure without invoking individual-level behavioral assumptions.

Country of Origin
πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ United States

Page Count
22 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Social and Information Networks