The necessity to model the flow of vehicles has become a priority in large urban centers and transit routes in general. This type of modeling can be used as a tool to establish new strategies, policy management and traffic control, to improve efficiency in the transport system. The vehicle traffic can be physically represented by three scales: microscopic, kinetic and macroscospic. In mathematical modeling of complex systems, such as traffic, none of these scale representations is effectively consistent with the physics of the system analyzed. On the other hand, cellular automata are distinct among the main computational models for simulation of vehicular traffic due to its ability to represent the principal characteristics of the traffic by using simple rules and low computational cost. The difference is that this type of modeling does not involve any kind of equation. The main objective of this work is to understand the use of computational modeling in the study of vehicular traffic through cellular automata. This is done by presenting a model that employs microscopic rules on movement of vehicles on the track with a single one-way road. The results are expressed through by graphs, flow vs. density, known as the fundamental diagram, and density vs. velocity.
traffic flow modelling; cellular automata
