this feature contributes to the necessary uncertainties in estimating the effects of rope formation.

As mentioned above we will here use the event generator to study the effects of string interaction and rope formation in more detail, beyond qualitative results such as increased strangeness and baryon production. The model is a generalization and extension of Mueller’s dipole model [@Mueller:1993rr; @Mueller:1994jq; @Mueller:1994gb], which describes BFKL evolution in transverse coordinate space. At high energies the high density of soft gluons effectively screens colour charges, thus suppressing gluons with $p_\perp$ below a saturation scale $Q_s$. As in the Color Glass Condensate formalism for nucleus collisions [@McLerran:1993ni; @McLerran:1993ka], we argue that this is a motivation for a perturbative treatment of the initial phase in terms of quarks and gluons. (This is also assumed in other models for soft interactions, like [P]{}and .)

While Mueller’s model reproduces leading log BFKL evolution, the model includes essential non-leading corrections to BFKL, as well as saturation within the cascade evolution, and confinement. It reproduces total, elastic, and diffractive cross sections in $pp$ collisions and DIS, and gives a good description of particle distributions in minimum-bias final states[@Flensburg:2011kk]. However, as parton distributions are generated within the model, and therefore 