Monday, August 24, 2009

New Publication: Random planar graphs and the London street network


We have just had news that the work we did examining the London road network has been accepted in The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems. The paper combines GIS and network analysis (graph theory) by Paolo Masucci, Duncan Smith, Mike Batty and myself to explore the street network of London both in its primary and dual representation.

For this research we took a radius of 27.6Km from the City of London, where the first Roman settlement was located and contains 95 percent of the population of the 33 boroughs that comprise the Greater London Authority which is also bounded by the M25 orbital road. In this way, we obtain a network we obtain a network with 163 878 intersections (the vertices), and 199 931 street segments (the edges) with 184191 nodes and 220688 links.

This data was derived from two Ordnance Survey (OS) dataset products, OS MeridianTM 2 which includes Motorways, A Roads, B Roads and Minor Roads, and the OS Integrated Transport Network (ITN). The latter includes all the above roads but in more detail with respect to a much greater number of minor roads.

Below is the abstract:

"In this paper we analyse the street network of London both in its primary and dual representation. To understand its properties, we consider three idealised models based on a grid, a static random planar graph and a growing random planar graph. Comparing the models and the street network, we find that the streets of London form a self-organising system whose growth is characterised by a strict interaction between the metrical and informational space. In particular, a principle of least effort appears to create a balance between the physical and the mental effort required to navigate the city."

The paper can be downloaded from here, while the full reference is:

Masucci, A. P., Smith, D., Crooks, A.T. and Batty, M. (2009) Random Planar Graphs and the London Street Network, The European Physical Journal B, 71 (2): 259-271. (pdf)

News of this research also featured in the Russian Newsweek. For those who read Russian the article can be found here.

1 comment:

The Daily Reviewer said...

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Cheers!

Angelina...