Towards a Unified View of Microscopic Traffic Flow Theories

Modeling and simulation of traffic has a long tradition. A vast number of different approaches have been used to simulate traffic, each of which has been calibrated and validated separately. This work aims at the way different models are interrelated. It is shown how one can, starting from very general modeling assumptions, construct a family of car following models that contains models closely related to well-known simulation models as special cases. Investigating this model family it can be shown, which models are qualitatively equivalent and which are not. This gives important hints as to which model approaches can in principle be unified