Modeling Traffic Flow

The talk will survey various models of traffic flow, with particular focus on new mathematical problems arising from some of these models. A large literature is currently available on particle models, describing the position of every car in terms of a large number of ODEs, and macroscopic models, where the traffic density is determined by a PDE.
Vehicular traffic can also be analyzed from the point of view of decision theory. Indeed, daily traffic patterns arise as the outcome of the decisions of a large number of drivers, who choose their departure time and route to destination in an ``optimal" way. Some recent work and open problems will be discussed.