Traffic flow from a physics perspective

Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne, Köln, Germany

Abstract

Physicists have been interested in traffic for a long time for various reasons. On the one hand, we all participate in traffic as pedestrians or drivers. On the other hand, traffic systems exhibit interesting, and sometimes counter-intuitive, collective phenomena. They are examples for nonequilibrium systems which allows to apply and test methods developed in statistical physics.