  The hadronic transport model \textsc{art} is extended to include the
production and annihilation of deuterons via the reactions $BB \leftrightarrow
dM$, where $B$ and $M$ stand for baryons and mesons, respectively, as well as
their elastic scattering with mesons and baryons in the hadronic matter. This
new hadronic transport model is then used to study the transverse momentum
spectrum and elliptic flow of deuterons in relativistic heavy ion collisions,
with the initial hadron distributions after hadronization of produced
quark-gluon plasma taken from a blast wave model. The results are compared with
those measured by the PHENIX and STAR Collaborations for Au+Au collisions at
$\sqrt{s_{NN}^{}} = 200$ GeV, and also with those obtained from the coalescence
model based on freeze-out nucleons in the transport model.
