Sociogenesis and unbounded space: Modelling cohesive collective motion #

Zohar Neu, Luca Giuggioli

10:30 Tuesday in 3Q16.

Part of the Collective behaviour and transport session.

Abstract #

Maintaining cohesion between randomly moving agents in unbounded space is an essential functionality for many real-world applications requiring distributed multi-agent systems. I present a bio-inspired collective movement model in unbounded space which ensures such functionality. Using an internal agent belief to estimate and respond to the coarse-grained state of the system, agent motion is coupled to a dynamically self-generated social ranking variable.

This coupling between social information and individual movement is exploited to induce spatial self-sorting and produces an adaptive, group-relative coordinate system that stabilises random motion in unbounded space. I will present simulation results and show the existence of two separate regimes for the system to attain dynamical cohesive states, including a Partial Sensing regime in which the system self-selects nearest-neighbour distances so as to ensure a near-constant mean number of sensed neighbours.

The approach presented here constitutes a theoretical shift in models of collective movement, as it considers agents that make decisions based on internal representations of their environment, rather than reacting to instantaneous sensory information.