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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 57: Networks: From Topology to Dynamics II (joint session DY/SOE)

DY 57.9: Talk

Friday, March 22, 2024, 12:00–12:15, BH-N 128

Network dynamics in urban mobility: a case study of Berlin during and after COVID-19 — •Marlli Zambrano, Andrzej Jarynowski, and Vitaly Belik — Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

In response to the urgent need for better models in the face of public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, this study presents a temporal network analysis of urban mobility and contact patterns in Berlin. To this end we leverage GPS mobile phone data (provided by Net Check GmbH) from 2020 and 2022, focusing on the month of November to reduce seasonal or holiday influences. The dataset encompasses 72,301 records with 14,908 nodes (persons) in 2020, and 96,844 records with 11,094 nodes in 2022. Two persons were in contact, if they spent at least 2 minutes on a 8x8 meters geolocation tile. Our approach highlights the temporal evolution of contact network clusters and community dynamics. We investigate the temporal motifs in people's movements between common locations like home and work, and the temporal heterogeneity in activity patterns. Our results indicate a significant temporal shift in mobility patterns during the pandemic, characterized by less path-like average nearest neighbor distances, as opposed to the post-pandemic period. Despite these temporal shifts, the frequency of contact motifs remained surprisingly consistent. This study not only offers a physics-focused lens on the impact of the pandemic on urban temporal networks but also paves the way for developing advanced models for urban dynamics in crisis situations.

Keywords: Networks Dynamics; Urban mobility; Networks Analysis; mobile phone data; COVID-19