Pedestrian collision avoidance with a local dynamic goal

"We present here a general formalism for equipping simulated pedestrians with an avoidance mechanism. The central idea is to use a short-range target which is adjusted dynamically depending on the environment and thus modulating the desired velocity of the agent. This formulation can be implemented over any type of existing pedestrian model, being force-based or rule-based. As an example, we implement a simple instance of the formulation which is adjusted to reproduce previous reported and available experimental data of collision avoidance in scenarios of low density. The proposed minimal model shows good agreement with the real trajectories and other macroscopic observables."