DOI: 10.3390/ijgi15080374 ISSN: 2220-9964

Geospatial Big Data Integration for Near-Real-Time Multimodal Urban Mobility Analysis

Boban Davidovic, Dusan Barac

Urban mobility systems generate large volumes of heterogeneous geospatial data that differ in temporal resolution, spatial coverage, update frequency, and semantic structure, making integrated near-real-time analysis difficult. This paper presents a geospatial big-data framework for integrating and analyzing multimodal urban mobility data from the Norwegian transport ecosystem, including public transport, micromobility, road infrastructure, weather sensing, and civil aviation. The framework is implemented as a modular pipeline for data ingestion, source-specific normalization, temporal alignment, and analytical processing, enabling minute-level comparison across heterogeneous operational feeds. The proposed approach preserves source-level semantics while supporting unified spatiotemporal analysis across transport modes with different operational characteristics. The framework is evaluated through analytical scenarios focused on peak and off-peak mobility dynamics, weather-related multimodal variability, and spatial autocorrelation of public transport activity and delay across four analysis windows and six Norwegian cities. The results show that mobility–weather relationships vary across transport modes and temporal windows, particularly in public transport activity, cycling behavior, and delay patterns, and that spatial clustering of public transport activity and delay is itself city- and window-dependent, with some cities showing strong, stable clustering and others showing none. The findings indicate that multimodal urban mobility should be interpreted as a context-dependent and interconnected spatiotemporal system rather than through isolated modal indicators. The study demonstrates how geospatial big-data integration can support near-real-time urban mobility monitoring and operational analytics in smart-city environments.

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