Identifying Region-Wide Functions Using Urban Taxicab Trajectories

Abstract

With the urban development and enlargement, various regions such as residential zones and administrative districts now appear as parts of cities. People exhibit different mobility patterns in each region, which is closely relevant to region-wide functions. In this article, we propose a scheme to discover region-wide functions using large-scale Shanghai taxicab trajectories that capture enormous traces for more than 13,000 taxicabs over a period of about 3 years. We investigate these taxicab trajectories and conduct an extensive preliminary study. Then, we divide the city into disjointed regions using Voronoi decomposition. By incorporating people’s pick-up and drop-off information, we refine the Voronoi partitioning results to identify region-wide functional areas. Finally, we study people’s movement frequency on weekdays and weekends for every kind of urban functional regions. We also look into human mobility within or across the identified urban functional regions. Experimental results show that human movement is bounded with the function of urban regions, and more than 90% of people visit neighboring (less than 20km travel distance) functional regions with high probability