About
Federico Bellisardi
Postdoctoral Researcher at IFISC (UIB–CSIC), Palma de Mallorca
I build data-driven and physics-informed models of complex systems, with a focus on urban mobility: how people move through a city, why it congests, and what can be done about it.
Biography
I am a physicist working on urban mobility with the tools of complex systems and data science. I want to understand how people and vehicles move through cities, why networks congest, and how the shape of a city and the terrain it sits on affect the cost of getting around.
I did my PhD in Physics at the University of Bologna, supervised by Armando Bazzani, and defended it in May 2025. My thesis, Data analytics and predictive models for sustainable multimodal mobility in future smart cities, combined Wi-Fi, mobile-phone and road-sensor data with agent-based and optimal-velocity models.
I am now a postdoctoral researcher at IFISC, the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Palma de Mallorca. Recently I have been studying how topography and the energy cost of moving shape the spatial organisation of cities, comparing 56 cities worldwide.
I like models that are simple enough to understand and grounded enough in real data to be useful for planning. I am also interested in how physics and machine learning can work together, for example in physics-informed neural networks.
Research interests
Cities, terrain and energy
How topography and movement energy relate to the spatial configuration of cities.
Congestion on networks
Random walks, maximum entropy and the transition to congestion on road graphs.
Agent-based & traffic simulation
Pedestrian and vehicular models, from heritage city centres to regional road networks.
Mobility data analytics
Turning Wi-Fi, mobile-phone, sensor and geolocated data into origin–destination flows and forecasts.
Selected publications
- Data-driven regional traffic simulation from heterogeneous mobility sources arXiv preprint, 2026
Cite
@misc{data-driven-regional-tra2026, title = {Data-driven regional traffic simulation from heterogeneous mobility sources}, author = {Bellisardi F. and Mizzi C. and Fabbri A. and Micheli D. and Vannelli A. and Bazzani A.}, howpublished = {arXiv preprint}, year = {2026} } - Mobility energetic balance frames spatial configuration of cities arXiv preprint, 2026 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2610.21558
Cite
@misc{mobility-energetic-balan2026, title = {Mobility energetic balance frames spatial configuration of cities}, author = {Bellisardi F. and Cano-Suñén E. and Ruiz-Varona A. and Ramasco J.J.}, howpublished = {arXiv preprint}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2610.21558} } - The Social Dynamics and Thermodynamics Mobility on Urban Networks International Interdisciplinary Chaos Symposium on Chaos and Complex Systems, 2026 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-09101-7_23
Cite
@article{the-social-dynamics-and-2026, title = {The Social Dynamics and Thermodynamics Mobility on Urban Networks}, author = {Turchetti G. and Bellisardi F. and Panichi F. and Zanlungo F.}, journal = {International Interdisciplinary Chaos Symposium on Chaos and Complex Systems}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-032-09101-7_23} }