Multiscale Modeling: Application to Traffic Flow
Résumé
Traffic modeling is a particularly active field, the origins of which can be traced back to the pioneering work of Greenshield in the 1930s. Greenshield was the first to formulate a structural relation between the speed of vehicles on a road and the distance between them. This relation between the flow rate/density, at the heart of the so-called fundamental diagram, has been used by all families of traffic flow models developed ever since. These families of models can be grouped into three distinct but strongly interconnected subcategories: macroscopic models, which consider flows of vehicles, microscopic models, which consider individual vehicles and their interactions, and mesoscopic models, which lie in between the other two categories.