In this paper, we give an elaborate and understandable review of traffic
cellular automata (TCA) models, which are a class of computationally efficient
microscopic traffic flow models. TCA models arise from the physics discipline
of statistical mechanics, having the goal of reproducing the correct
macroscopic behaviour based on a minimal description of microscopic
interactions. After giving an overview of cellular automata (CA) models, their
background and physical setup, we introduce the mathematical notations, show
how to perform measurements on a TCA model's lattice of cells, as well as how
to convert these quantities into real-world units and vice versa. The majority
of this paper then relays an extensive account of the behavioural aspects of
several TCA models encountered in literature. Already, several reviews of TCA
models exist, but none of them consider all the models exclusively from the
behavioural point of view. In this respect, our overview fills this void, as it
focusses on the behaviour of the TCA models, by means of time-space and
phase-space diagrams, and histograms showing the distributions of vehicles'
speeds, space, and time gaps. In the report, we subsequently give a concise
overview of TCA models that are employed in a multi-lane setting, and some of
the TCA models used to describe city traffic as a two-dimensional grid of
cells, or as a road network with explicitly modelled intersections. The final
part of the paper illustrates some of the more common analytical approximations
to single-cell TCA models.Comment: Accepted for publication in "Physics Reports". A version of this
paper with high-quality images can be found at: http://phdsven.dyns.cx (go to
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