Modeling Transportation in the Roman World: Implications for World Systems

ORBIS is a geospatial transportation network model of the Roman world, simulating historical travel patterns by modeling the major roads, rivers, and sea routes active during the Roman Empire. With such a model, historians can more accurately examine not only individual route patterns, but also emergent structures of the network as a whole. By defining traditional world systems networks as a particular movement profile for application on a geospatial transportation network, we can begin to see regions of the network using community analysis and analyze those regions for historical patterns.