Abstract:

Traffic phenomena such as the transition from free to congested flow, lane inversion and platoon formation can be accurately reproduced using cellular automata. Being computationally extremely efficient, they simulate large traffic systems many times faster than real time so that predictions become feasible. A riview of recent results is given. The presence of metastable states at the jamming transition is discussed in detail. A simple new cellular automation is introduced, in which the interaction between cars is Galilei-invariant. It is shown that this type of interaction accounts for metastable states in a very natural way.