Some theoretical reasonings on the use and abuse of empirical data for vehicular traffic modelling

This paper deals with a critical analysis on the use of empirical data in the modelling of vehicular traffic dynamics. The analysis is focused on the modelling according to the macroscopic scale and the approach of the kinetic theory and aims at showing how the empirical data available in the literature can be used to derive and validate models and how these data should not be artificially plugged into models. Conceivable reasonings on the analogous problem focused on crowd modelling are proposed in the last part of this paper.