From mobility traces to process networks: evidence of structural heterogeneity in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area

Abstract Typically, past works on urban mobility have leveraged origin–destination analysis to capture where people travel, often leaving the sequence and structure of their trips unaddressed, thereby limiting the diagnosis of accessibility inequalities. We address this gap by integrating process mining and network science, applying both frameworks to Call Detail Records (CDRs) from the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. From 2.7 million reconstructed trips, we construct case-centric event logs and discover Directly-Follows Graphs (DFGs) for morning commuting in each of the 18 municipalities. We represent these DFGs as weighted directed networks and compare them using eight complementary metrics, including degree-distribution Wasserstein distance, flow correlation, Jensen–Shannon divergence, and a composite complexity index. This reveals systematic structural heterogeneity that aggregated OD analysis cannot detect. Lisbon city emerges as a structural outlier, with the highest modal diversity and most complex DFG topology, whereas most peripheral municipalities are dominated by private car use. Geographic proximity does not guarantee temporal accessibility: median commutes between neighbouring municipalities such as Sintra and Cascais exceed 25 min, indicating infrastructure gaps. Municipalities cluster into spatially coherent groups defined by shared mobility process structures−a northern suburban cluster, a southern Tagus cluster, and an outlying Lisbon cluster−patterns that are consistent across structural and temporal metrics. Inferred commuting patterns align strongly with 2021 Census data (Pearson r = 0.94, Spearman ρ = 0.90), supporting the validity of the approach. We show that process mining and network science are complementary: process mining yields structured event representations and modal sequencing, while network science offers robust tools for structural comparison. However, DFG structures represent only mode–destination transitions, not full multimodal trip chains, a limitation to be addressed in future works. Similar content being viewed by others Funding The authors acknowledge the financial support provided by FCT Portugal under the project UIDB/04152/2020 – Centro de Investigação em Gestão de Informação (MagIC/NovaIMS) (https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/04152/2020) and Project Enhance - F-DUT-2022-0393. Author information Authors and Affiliations Corresponding author Ethics declarations Ethics approval Not applicable Consent for publication All authors gave their final approval for publication and agreed to be responsible for the work they did. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Additional information Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Additional file Rights and permissions Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. About this article Cite this article Filonchik, K., Pinto, J.D., Pinheiro, F.L. et al. From mobility traces to process networks: evidence of structural heterogeneity in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Appl Netw Sci (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-026-00822-2 Received: Accepted: Published: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-026-00822-2