Cellular automaton (CA) approach is an important theoretical framework for studying complex system behavior and has been widely applied in various research field. CA traffic flow models have the advantage of flexible evolution rules and high computation efficiency. Therefore, CA develops very quickly and has been widely applied in transportation field. In recent two decades, traffic flow study quickly developed, among which “synchronized flow” is perhaps one of the most important concepts and findings. Many new CA models have been proposed in this direction. This paper makes a review of the development of CA models, concerning their ability to reproduce synchronized flow as well as traffic breakdown from free flow to synchronized flow. Finally, future directions have been discussed.

元胞自动机（CA）方法是研究复杂系统行为的重要理论框架，已广泛应用于各个研究领域。CA流量模型具有灵活的演化规则和高计算效率的优点。因此，CA发展非常迅速，已在交通领域得到广泛应用。在最近的二十年中，交通流研究迅速发展，其中“同步流”可能是最重要的概念和发现之一。在这个方向上已经提出了许多新的CA模型。本文回顾了CA模型的发展，讨论了它们再现同步流的能力以及从自由流到同步流的流量分解。最后，讨论了未来的方向。