Preserving universal mobility scaling laws with the human flow electrical circuit model

Understanding human mobility at the urban scale is essential for modeling traffic and evaluating infrastructure resilience. The Human Flow Electrical Circuit Model, which represents human movement as a current through a resistive spatial network, has been proposed to capture intra-urban mobility. However, whether this model preserves the universal statistical properties observed in empirical data remains unverified. We assessed the model’s validity by deriving the flow from potential gradients and applying Drainage Basin Analysis, one of several approaches used to explore potential scaling patterns in GPS-based mobility data. Our results show that the model reproduces key empirical features, including power-law distributions of drainage basin sizes and populations, consistent fractal dimensions, and spatial decay of population density. These findings suggest that the model captures the spatial organization of intra-urban mobility while maintaining universal scaling behavior. This supports its potential as a theoretical framework for analyzing complex urban flow systems and their responses to disruptions.