Finding Optimal Transport Route And Retail Outlet Location Using Mobile Phone Location Data

People are leaving their digital footprint everywhere as they move from one cell tower coverage to another in terms of Call Detail Records (CDR). This huge and variant data can be analyzed to find interesting human mobility patterns for socio-economic development and allow a city administrator to understand the daily commuting patterns of the city dwellers in almost real-time. This paper proposes the techniques and algorithms that use these data to identify (i) optimal transport routes in a city; (ii) Business viable retail outlet location in a city. The aggregated information has been modeled as a network, and graph-theoretic approaches are used to derive a feasible solution. The main advantage of this work is that CDR provides low cost, real-time, noise-free data that captures the evolving dynamics of the movement patterns, and hence any decision taken based on this will be apt and prompt.The only limitation of this study is the unavailability of raw CDR data due to the confidentiality issue for experimental proof of the proposed methods on a real city topology.