EPJ Data Sci. (2019) 8: 37
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0216-6

Regular article

Gravity law in the Chinese highway freight transportation networks

¹ School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
² Zhicang Technologies, Beijing, China
³ Research Center for Econophysics, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
⁴ Department of Mathematics, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China

^* e-mail: wxzhou@ecust.edu.cn

Received: 13 September 2019
Accepted: 5 December 2019
Published online: 12 December 2019

Abstract

The gravity law has been documented in many socioeconomic networks, which states that the flow between two nodes positively correlates with the strengths of the nodes and negatively correlates with the distance between the two nodes. However, such research on highway freight transportation networks (HFTNs) is rare. We construct the directed and undirected highway freight transportation networks between 338 Chinese cities using about 15.06 million truck transportation records in five months and test the traditional and modified gravity laws using GDP, population, and per capita GDP as the node strength. It is found that the gravity law holds over about two orders of magnitude for the whole sample, as well as the daily samples, except for the days around the Spring Festival during which the daily sample sizes are significantly small. Accordingly, the daily exponents of the gravity law are stable except during the Spring Festival period. The results also show that the gravity law has higher explanatory power for the undirected HFTNs than for the directed HFTNs. However, the traditional and modified gravity laws have comparable explanatory power.