State-of-the-art of Vehicular Traffic Flow Modelling

Nowadays traffic flow and congestion is one of the main societal and economical problems related to transportation in industrialised countries. In this respect, managing traffic in congested networks requires a clear understanding of traffic flow operations. That is, insights into what causes congestion, what determines the time and location of traffic breakdown, how does the congestion propagate through the network, etc., are essential. For this purpose, during the past fifty years, a wide range of traffic flow theories and models have been developed to answer these research questions. This paper presents a overview of some fifty years of modelling vehicular traffic flow. A rich variety of modelling approaches developed so far and in use today will be discussed and compared. The considered models are classified based on the level-of-detail with which the vehicular flow is described. For each of the categories, issues like modelling accuracy, applicability, generalisability, and model calibration and validation, are discussed.