Analyzing the activity space parameters of human daily intra-city movements: the home and workplace relative to the city center

The study of intra-city movement patterns has been a continuing research topic in GIScience, urban planning, traffic forecasting, and location-based services. Previous studies have mainly considered the effect of demographic parameters such as age, gender, etc., on the intra-city human movement and less on the places where the person moves between them. Therefore, in this study, a method has been proposed to investigate the impact of home and workplace of people relative to the city center on movement on weekdays and weekends. In this method, the concept of activity space and quantification of its parameters have been used. Therefore, two new indices were introduced, including the Activity Range Index (ARI) and Activity Linearity Index (ALI), to compute the range of movement and their linearity, respectively. The concept of entropy has also been used to examine the predictability of people’s movements. The proposed method results on the MDC dataset of Switzerland showed that the users whose homes and workplaces are both in the city center have the lowest ARI on weekdays and weekends (on average, 24.19% and 34.84% above the avg. of avg. of the movement range parameters, respectively). Also, the users whose homes are in the city center and their workplaces are outside the city center or vice versa have the lowest ALI (highest linear movement) on weekdays and the highest ALI (lowest linear movement) on weekends (on average, 14.9% below and 29.71% above the avg. of avg. of each movement linearity parameter, respectively). Eventually, the users whose homes and workplaces are both located inside the city center have the most irregular pattern on weekdays or weekends (on average, 11.23% and 1.45% above the avg. of avg. of movement entropy on weekdays and weekends, respectively.