Cartographic generalization of urban street networks based on gravitational field theory

The automatic generalization of urban street networks is a constant and important aspect of geographical information science. Previous studies show that the dual graph for street–street relationships more accurately reflects the overall morphological properties and importance of streets than do other methods. In this study, we construct a dual graph to represent street–street relationship and propose an approach to generalize street networks based on gravitational field theory. We retain the global structural properties and topological connectivity of an original street network and borrow from gravitational field theory to define the gravitational force between nodes. The concept of multi-order neighbors is introduced and the gravitational force is taken as the measure of the importance contribution between nodes. The importance of a node is defined as the result of the interaction between a given node and its multi-order neighbors. Degree distribution is used to evaluate the level of maintaining the global structure and topological characteristics of a street network and to illustrate the efficiency of the suggested method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can be used in generalizing street networks and retaining their density characteristics, connectivity and global structure.