Novel approach of depicting urban transportation based on mobile billing data

This paper shows the approach of using mobile billing data as probes to depict the status of urban transportation. Instead of focusing on the road to represent the urban transportation, we proposed the indicator of base station area. First of all, based on people´s spatial-temporal behavior of calling and daily life, we obtained the working place and living place from the billing data. Moreover, we assigned the commuting trips from home to working place to every cell tower people may pass by. Finally, we utilize indicator of traffic flow in the base station areas to depict the congestion of transportation during rush hours. All the work are been done on the real mobile billing dataset of a major city in China with over 2.5 million anonymous mobile users´ phone records during 3 months.