Abstract:
Human mobility is often described through aggregate quantities such as origin-destination flows, travel distances, or traffic volumes. While these representations reveal important regularities, they can obscure how individuals actually move through transportation networks: the paths they take, how previous movements shape subsequent decisions, and how behavior varies across people and environments. In this talk, I will present recent work that shifts the focus from aggregate mobility patterns toward the structure and heterogeneity of individual movement. Drawing on empirical GPS data, agent-based simulations, and higher-order network models, we investigate how sequential dependencies shape mobility and its predictability, how faithfully commonly used benchmarks and synthetic populations reproduce observed human movement, and how mobility behavior changes across different built environments. Across these studies, a common picture emerges: systems that appear remarkably similar at an aggregate level can differ substantially in their path structure, behavioral diversity, and predictability. These findings highlight the opportunities offered by emerging mobility data and simulation models and motivate new network-based approaches for understanding, predicting, and designing transportation systems that better reflect how people actually move.
Bio:
Dr. Jürgen Hackl is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, where he leads the Complex Infrastructure Systems group. His research lies at the intersection of network science, transportation, and infrastructure systems, with a particular focus on human mobility, spatial-temporal and higher-order networks, uncertainty quantification, and data-driven modeling of complex systems. His work develops new methods to understand how people, information, and resources move through infrastructure networks and how these dynamics can be represented, predicted, and incorporated into simulation and decision-making.
He received his PhD from ETH Zürich in 2019 and subsequently held research and faculty positions at the University of Zürich, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Cambridge before joining Princeton in 2023. His research spans transportation, power, and urban infrastructure systems and combines methodological advances in network science with applications to the analysis, design, and resilience of complex engineered systems.
Andrea Cehaic
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