Movement & logistics
Movement and logistics: traffic, transit, crowds, shipping and the networks that move people and goods.
stories
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A live model of the roads spots a bus falling behind and helps staff change the signals ahead of it.
articles
- A scalable and generic framework for city-wide traffic prediction with large language model article draft
2026 Nature Communications paper by Jinlei Zhang and colleagues at Beijing Jiaotong University, King's College London and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; proposes LLM-UTP, one language-model-based model that predicts short-term traffic flow across metro, bus, bike, taxi, freeway and rail in 29 cities and areas, with code and most data released.
books
A practical primer from Crooks, Malleson, Manley and Heppenstall, 2019, on building agent-based models of people in places and linking them to GIS, with worked examples in NetLogo.
Michael Batty's 2013 argument that cities are flows and networks rather than fixed artefacts, with the models that follow from treating them that way.
Ben Green's 2019 argument that cities should use technology as a tool for democratic and equitable ends rather than treat it as the goal, with cases of smart-city projects gone wrong and alternatives.
Open-access edited volume from Shi, Goodchild, Batty, Kwan and Zhang, 2021, on the data, methods and infrastructure used to sense, model and run cities.
tools
Aimsun's real-time traffic management twin, Aimsun Live, uses live and historical data to simulate a road network and forecast conditions; the same company makes the Aimsun Next transport simulation software.
Movement & logistics closed sourceclosed data
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Open-source Python library by Yuta Sato and colleagues that turns buildings, streets, transit feeds, origin–destination matrices, zones and points of interest into graphs for network analysis in NetworkX and for graph neural networks in PyTorch Geometric.
Cities & placesMovement & logistics open sourceAPIopen participation
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Open-source microscopic traffic simulator, an Eclipse Foundation project; models road vehicles, public transport, bicycles and pedestrians one by one on large networks.
Movement & logistics open sourceAPI
Open-source framework for large-scale agent-based transport simulation, maintained by its contributors and the MATSim Association; simulates every traveller's day on a road and public-transport network.
Movement & logistics open sourceopen participation
World model from Odyssey that generates an interactive 3D environment from a prompt and predicts how it changes as a person or agent moves and acts in it.
Sensory landscapeMovement & logistics closed source
Replica supplies modelled travel activity for US regions and a Scenario service that re-runs its mobility model under changed population, employment or road-closure inputs for transport and regional planning.
Movement & logistics closed sourceclosed data
A hosted service that rates the walkability of any address from 0 to 100 from the walking distance to nearby amenities and from street measures; its companions Transit Score and Bike Score rate public transport and cycling. Scores are served through a widget and an API.
Movement & logisticsPeople & society closed sourceclosed dataAPIpartly open participation
data sources
Volunteer-built open map database of the world, covering roads, buildings, land use and places; the base layer most digital twins of places start from.
Cities & placesMovement & logistics open dataopen participation
digital twins
Tees Valley Combined Authority runs a live model of the region's roads, built on Aimsun Live, at the traffic control centre in Middlesbrough; it spots late-running buses and triggers pre-approved signal timing changes.
Movement & logistics closed source
Mehmet Kerem Turkcan's city-scale digital twin of New York City's five boroughs, compiled from public municipal records, with real-time rendering, traffic and pedestrian simulation and a CARLA-style Python API.
Cities & placesMovement & logisticsSensory landscape open sourcepartly open dataAPI
questions
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Where will traffic go when a road closes or a lane is taken, and can signals or a timetable change keep buses on time?
Symbol: "train junction" by Worakamon Saykajarn, Noun Project, CC BY 3.0.