Important announcement

Dear visitor,

Please note that this OpenCourseWare platform will be replaced at the end of 2026 by a new platform (under the same url ocw.tudelft.nl).

Courses and their contents that are currently available the platform will partly be migrated. URL’s for this content will change and content might be unavailable for some time. In addition, some courses will not be available anymore.

If you are linking to specific courses on this platform (for instance for your students), please take timely measures to avoid problems with access. Possible actions are:

  • Download the materials to your local platform (laptop, server)
  • For educators only (including TU Delft lecturers): Contact us at ocw@tudelft.nl and inform us what course you are using in what context (institute, program, period of use, number of students). We will research (in collaboration with the authors of the course) and decide if we will migrate the course, and if yes, can supply you with a new url.

Thank you.

This course discusses fundamental traffic flow characteristics and traffic flow variables. Their definitions are presented, and visualization/analysis techniques are discussed and empirical facts are presented. The empirical relation between the flow variables and the bottleneck capacity analysis are discussed. Shockwave analysis and a review of macroscopic traffic flow models are presented. Traffic flow stability issues are discussed as well as numerical solution approaches.

The lectures also show how macroscopic models are derived from microscopic principles. This course provides an overview of human factors relevant for the behavior of drivers. The car-following model and other approaches to describe the lateral driving task will be discussed. The lectures also pertains to general gap acceptance modeling and lane changing. Microscopic models for pedestrian flow behavior are discussed and an in depth discussion of microscopic simulation models will be presented.

To gain insight into theory and modeling of traffic flow operations, to learn to apply theory and mathematical models to solve practical problems and to gain experience with using simulation programs for ex-ante assessment studies.

Creative Commons License
Traffic Flow Theory and Simulation by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/traffic-flow-theory-simulation/.
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