Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 19, 2026

Using a Virtual Reality Walking Simulator to Investigate Pedestrian Behavior
Published on: June 9, 2020
Scaling law of individual urban tour behavior
Xu-Jie Lin1, Yitao Yang2, Wei-Peng Nie1
1Beijing Jiaotong University, School of Systems Science, Beijing, China.
Abstract:
Analyzing and modeling the mobility process with tour behavior is fundamental to understanding a wide range of complex systems, including animal foraging, human mobility, and freight transportation. However, despite their importance, the distribution of tour length has long been neglected in individual human mobility models. To fill this gap, we analyze Foursquare users' check-in data and find that the distribution of urban tour length follows a truncated power-law distribution. To reproduce the universal scaling law for human mobility in urban areas, we introduce a tour terminate-continue model. Our model reproduces not only the urban tour length distribution, but also Heaps' law, Zipf's law, and the distribution of the radius of gyration, providing an additional perspective for characterizing individual human mobility.
Related Concept Videos
Population Growth
Introduction to Limits
Modeling with Differential Equations
Schemas
Types of Limits II
Impact of Social Context on Individuals

