Leveraging  mobile  network  big  data    for  urban  planning  Kaushalya  Madhawa,  LIRNEasia  

Responsible  use  of  mobile  meta-­‐data  to  support  public  purposes  Jetwing  Lagoon,  Negombo  

08  August  2014  

This  work  was  carried  out  with  the  aid  of  a  grant  from  the  InternaHonal  Development  Research  Centre,  OMawa,  Canada.    

Some  urban  planning  challenges  

•  Understanding  ciHzen’s  actual  use  of  urban  environments  

•  Monitoring  urban  evoluHon  over  Hme  •  Understanding  reasons  why  people  congregate  at  different  locaHons  

•  Assessing  the  impact  of  development  acHviHes    

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Some  urban  planning  challenges  

•  Understanding  ciHzen’s  actual  use  of  urban  environments  

•  Monitoring  urban  evoluHon  over  Hme  •  Understanding  reasons  why  people  congregate  at  different  locaHons  

•  Assessing  the  impact  of  development  acHviHes    

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Can  we  use  mobile  network  data  to  understand  land  use?  •  People  leave  digital  traces  when  they  use  communicaHon  devices.  

•  Mobile  communicaHon  paMerns  at  different  locaHons  can  be  leveraged  to  classify  them  into  land-­‐use  categories.    

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User  signatures  at  two  different  base  staHons  

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Base station 1 Base station 2

Methodology  

•  Diurnal  paMern  of  users  is  profiled  at  different  base  staHons  during  weekdays  and  weekends  

•  Time  series  of  each  base  staHon  is  normalized  to  a  (0-­‐1)  range    

•  Euclidean  distance  between  two  Hme  series  is  used  to  cluster  base  staHons  in  an  unsupervised  manner  using  k-­‐means  algorithm  

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DistribuHon  of  base  staHons  in  Colombo  district  

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A  closer  look  at  base  staHons  in  each  cluster  

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Cluster 1 Cluster 2

What  does  this  reveal?  

•  Cluster  1  exhibits  paMerns  consistent  with  a  commercial  area  

 •  Cluster  2  exhibits  paMerns  

consistent  with  less  commercial  and  more  residenHal  area  (or  possibly  mixed)    

 

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The  Central  Business  District  (CBD)  seems  to  have  expanded  

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North  Colombo  is  Colombo’s  inner  city  

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Photo: ©Senanayake Bandara - Panoramio

Seethawaka  Export  Processing  Zone  (EPZ)  

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Seethawaka EPZ Photo ©Senanayaka Bandara - Panoramio

Future  work  

•  InvesHgate  more  fine  grained  land  use  categorizaHon  

 •  Use  this  methodology  to  monitor  the  evoluHon  of  urbanizaHon  of  a  region    

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