Predicting human mobility patterns has many practical applications in urban planning, traffic engineering, infectious disease epidemiology, emergency management and location-based services. Developing a universal model capable of accurately predicting the mobility fluxes between locations is a fundamental and challenging problem in regional economics and transportation science. Here, we propose a new parameter-free model named opportunity priority selection model as an alternative in human mobility prediction. The basic assumption of the model is that an individual will select destination locations that present higher opportunity benefits than the location opportunities of the origin and the intervening opportunities between the origin and destination. We use real mobility data collected from a number of cities and countries to demonstrate the predictive ability of this simple model. The results show that the new model offers universal predictions of intracity and intercity mobility patterns that are consistent with real observations, thus suggesting that the proposed model better captures the mechanism underlying human mobility than previous models.

Predicting human mobility between locations has practical applications in transportation science, spatial economics, sociology and many other fields. For more than 100 years, many human mobility prediction models have been proposed, among which the gravity model analogous to Newton's law of gravitation is widely used. Another classical model is the intervening opportunity (IO) model, which indicates that an individual selecting a destination is related to both the destination's opportunities and the intervening opportunities between the origin and the destination. The IO model established from the perspective of individual selection behavior has recently triggered the establishment of many new IO class models. Although these IO class models can achieve accurate prediction at specific spatiotemporal scales, an IO class model that can describe an individual's destination selection behavior at different spatiotemporal scales is still lacking. Here, we develop a universal opportunity model that considers two human behavioral tendencies: one is the exploratory tendency, and the other is the cautious tendency. Our model establishes a new framework in IO class models and covers the classical radiation model and opportunity priority selection model. Furthermore, we use various mobility data to demonstrate our model's predictive ability. The results show that our model can better predict human mobility than previous IO class models. Moreover, this model can help us better understand the underlying mechanism of the individual's destination selection behavior in different types of human mobility.

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This study proposes a lane-changing trajectory planning method for automated vehicles under various road linetypes. The method uses the polynomial regression model to describe the road line-types, and then a non-linear optimisation model is constructed to generate the lane-changing trajectory based on the road polynomial functions. The process of connecting the lane-changing manoeuvre with the car-following manoeuvre is discussed in this study, which ensures the ride comfort of the ego vehicle after the lane-changing manoeuvre. Moreover, considering that the lag vehicle on the target lane may be affected by the lane-changing manoeuvre, the situation that the lag vehicle maintains the car-following manoeuvre with the ego vehicle is taken into account in the authors' model. Another small innovation is that they have designed a simple and effective method to find the suitable initial guess for the proposed non-linear optimisation model. The simulation results show that the lane-changing trajectory generated by the proposed model is smooth and continuous, and the automated vehicle can avoid potential collisions efficiently during the lane-changing process. In emergent conditions, the proposed model can also plan the corrected trajectory to ensure safety.