Simulation of vehicular traffic: a statistical physics perspective

Computer simulation of vehicular traffic can give us insight into a wide variety of phenomena observed in real traffic flow, thereby leading to a greater qualitative understanding of its basic principles. These simulations also help us explore the effects of implementing new traffic rules and control systems without doing potentially hazardous experiments with real traffic. For the sake of computational efficiency, many of the microscopic traffic models developed in recent years have been formulated using the language of cellular automata. These models of vehicular traffic belong to a class of nonequilibrium systems called driven-diffusive lattice gases (B. Schmittmann and R.K.P. Zia, 1995; G. Schutz, 2000). Over the last few years, several groups have been doing extensive computer simulations to understand the nature of the steady states and fluctuations, as well as the kinetics of evolution toward these steady states. The starting points of our discussion are the Nagel-Schreckenberg model (K. Nagel and M. Schreckenberg, 1992) and the Biham-Middleton-Levine model (O. Biham et al., 1992)