Cellular automaton models and traffic flow

A recently introduced cellular automaton model for the description of traffic flow is investigated. It generalises asymmetric exclusion models which have attracted a lot of interest in the past. We calculate the so-called fundamental diagram (flow vs.\ density) for parallel dynamics using an improved mean-field approximation which takes into account short-range correlations. For maximum velocity 1 we find that the simplest non-trivial of these approximations gives already the exact result. For higher velocities our results are in excellent agreement with numerical data.