Systematic literature review of vehicular traffic flow simulators

In modern world means of communication and commutation plays a significant role in collective social growth. It is a well observed phenomenon that due to concentration of educational, career, and business opportunities along with easy access to services, population is increasing in urban centers. Increasing population in urban centers is posing many challenges to urban managers and engineers. Ensuring smooth vehicular traffic flow is very important among them. It includes maintenance of current traffic infrastructure, optimal deployment of traffic regulators and cost effective extension of existing infrastructure which requires experimentation of different what-if scenarios. Urban traffic is among those systems which cannot be interrupted in order to experiment hence simulation is most suitable option for policy makers to perform different what-if scenarios. Choice of vehicular traffic flow simulator play a vital role in experimenting these what-if scenarios. This paper presents a systematic review of existing vehicular traffic flow simulators presented and used in research literature. This review includes type of license i.e. the simulator is closed or open source and freeware or proprietary, usage of the simulator i.e. what type of modeling and simulation tasks can be performed using the simulator, developer of the simulator, and citations of the simulator in research literature.