Perceived cost potential field cellular automata model with an aggregated force field for pedestrian dynamics

•We consider two effects, perceived potential field and aggregated force vector field, in a crowd.•The perceived cost potential is used to navigate pedestrians moving in local low-density domains.•The aggregated force vector field is applied to describe the pushing force among pedestrians.

This paper proposes a perceived potential field and an aggregated force field for navigation of pedestrians in a walking domain with poor visibility or complex geometries. While the former field used in uncrowded cells simply reflects the pedestrians’ desire to minimize their travel costs, the latter field used in crowded cells suggests much stronger interaction between pedestrians. Compared with a formulation that does not include the latter field, the proposed model displays an advantage in simulating over-crowded pedestrian flows, e.g., at the front of a bottleneck or at a left/right turn in a corridor; the simulated phenomena, including phase transitions and fundamental diagrams, agree well with the observation and studies in the literature.