Statistical physics of vehicular traffic and some related systems

In the so-called "microscopic" models of vehicular traffic, attention is pa id explicitly to each individual vehicle each of which is represented by a "particle"; the nature of the "interactions" among these particles is deter mined by the way the vehicles influence each others' movement. Therefore, v ehicular traffic, modeled as a system of interacting "particles" driven far from equilibrium, offers the possibility to study various fundamental aspe cts of truly nonequilibrium systems which are of current interest in statis tical physics. Analytical as well as numerical techniques of statistical ph ysics are being used to study these models to understand rich variety of ph ysical phenomena exhibited by vehicular traffic. Some of these phenomena, o bserved in vehicular traffic under different circumstances, include transit ions from one dynamical phase to another, criticality and self-organized cr iticality, metastability and hysteresis, phase-segregation, etc. In this cr itical review, written from the perspective of statistical physics, we expl ain the guiding principles behind all the main theoretical approaches. But we present detailed discussions on the results obtained mainly from the so- called "particle-hopping" models, particularly emphasizing those which have been formulated in recent years using the language of cellular automata. ( C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.