Genealogy of traffic flow models

Abstract

An historical overview of the development of traffic flow models is proposed in the form of a model tree. The model tree shows the genealogy of four families: the fundamental relation, microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic models. We discuss the families, branches and models. By describing the historical developments of traffic flow modeling, we take one step further back than conventional literature reviews that focus on the current state-of-the-art. This allows us to identify the main trends in traffic flow modeling: (1) convergence of many branches to generalized models, (2) adaptations and extensions of the LWR model to deal with real phenomena, (3) multi-class versions of many models and, (4) the development of hybrid models combining the advantages of different types of models.