LogiNets: Extracting Logistics Network Flows from Mobile Phone Geolocations for Strategic Planning

Research Project, 2025

For planning efficient and sustainable future transport systems one must consider all transport related flows within a given territory, including the flows of goods. However, logistics operations data is largely in the hands of private actors and it becomes extremely hard to create general logistics models to represent logistics network flows for strategic transport planning. The aim of this project is to construct large-scale logistics networks, representing the freight flows between logistics facilities across a large territory, with high spatial and temporal resolution, using general purpose mobile phone geolocation data. By employing an urban analytics approach, the researchers will develop the computational methods to process big mobile geolocation data and extract the OD matrices of freight flows between logistics facilities, demonstrated in two case studies. The resulting logistics networks and freight flow data will provide a model to advance the study of logistic operations at multiple scales. Furthermore, they offer the opportunity to place logistics on the table of urban and transport planners alongside the existing data and models for the flows of people, supporting a more holistic understanding and the integrated planning of the transport system.