Structure and evolution of urban heavy truck mobility networks

Revealing the structural properties and understanding the evolutionary mechanisms of the urban heavy truck mobility network (UHTMN) provide insights in assessment of freight policies to manage and regulate the urban freight system, and are of vital importance for improving the livability and sustainability of cities. Although massive urban heavy truck mobility data become available in recent years, in-depth studies on the structure and evolution of UHTMN are still lacking. Here we use massive urban heavy truck GPS data in China to construct the UHTMN and reveal its a wide range of structure properties. We further develop an evolving network model that simultaneously considers weight, space and system element duplication. Our model reproduces the observed structure properties of UHTMN and helps us understand its underlying evolutionary mechanisms. Our model also provides new perspectives for modeling the evolution of many other real-world networks, such as protein interaction networks, citation networks and air transportation networks.