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Introduction

Cellular automata methods have their applications primarily in areas of spatio-temporal dynamics. Transportation simulations, with travelers and vehicles moving through cities, fall into that category. There are however also important differences between a ``standard'' CA simulation and those used in traffic. These differences are that in traffic, the dynamics is normally considered as unfolding on a graph instead of on flat space, and that particles in transportation simulations are better characterized as ``intelligent agents''. These aspects will be discussed in Secs. 3 and 4. This is followed by a discussion of the limits of the CA technology and relations to other methods (Sec. 5), and a short outlook on a simulation of ``all of Switzerland'' (Sec. 6). The paper is concluded by a summary.



Kai Nagel 2002-05-31