Modelling negative interactions among pedestrians in high density situations

•We model pedestrian dynamics in high density situations.•We describe a basic floor-field based model and two extensions.•We experiment them in high density situations and discuss the results.

Situations characterised by the presence of a high density of pedestrians involved in negative interactions (e.g. flows in opposite directions) often represent a problematic scenario for simulation models, especially those taking a discrete approach to the representation and management of spatial aspects of the environment. While these situations can be relatively infrequent, and even if architects, event organisers and crowd managers actually try to prevent them as much as possible, they simply cannot be neglected and they actually represent interesting situations to be analysed by means of simulation. The paper presents specific extensions to a floor-field Cellular Automata pedestrian model that are specifically aimed at supporting the simulation of high density situations comprising negative interactions among pedestrians without incurring in the traditional limits of discrete approaches. The models are formally described and experimented in experimental and real world situations.