Characterizing and modeling the patterns of vehicle movement on road networks

Abstract

Understanding vehicle movement on road networks is closely related to various practical and theoretical issues. While recent works have focused on which cost vehicles minimize while moving, how they move to minimize that cost remains less explored. In this work, we analyze large-scale data of individual vehicle trajectories in real-world road networks to identify cost-minimizing movement patterns of vehicles and the influence of road network structure on such movement. We observed that vehicle movements exhibit three phases: the beginning, middle, and end of trips. At the beginning and end, vehicles detour more, lose directional memory quickly, and travel at lower speeds than during the middle. In contrast, during the middle, they tend to detour less, maintain directional memory, and travel faster than at the beginning and end. Finally, at the beginning and end, vehicles exhibit similar detour and velocity patterns, except the direction of movement. To understand these patterns, we propose a double-layered network model mimicking the hierarchical structure of real-world road networks. We found that when vehicles move across our model network while minimizing travel time, they tend to concentrate on high-level roads, and the three observed movement phases are reproduced. Consequently, when a vehicle moves between a given origin-destination pair, it must enter and exit these high-level roads. This causes it to deviate from the trajectory that minimizes travel distance between the same origin-destination pair -- particularly at the beginning and end of the trip. Our results reveal common patterns underlying individual vehicle movements that appear highly diverse at first glance, demonstrating that these patterns emerge because vehicles leverage the characteristics of hierarchical road networks to minimize travel time.