Collective decision making in cohesive flocks

Abstract

Most of us must have been fascinated by the eye catching displays of collectively moving animals. Schools of fish can move in a rather orderly fashion and then change direction amazingly abruptly. There are a huge number of further examples both from the living and the non-living world for phenomena during which the many interacting, permanently moving units seem to arrive at a common behavioural pattern taking place in a short time. As a paradigm of this type of phenomena we consider the problem of how birds arrive at a decision resulting in their synchronized landing. We introduce a simple model to interpret this process. Collective motion prior to landing is modelled using a simple self-propelled particle (SPP) system with a new kind of boundary condition, while the tendency and the sudden propagation of the intention of landing is introduced through rules analogous to the random field Ising model in an external field. We show that our approach is capable of capturing the most relevant features of collective decision making in a system of units with a variance of individual intentions and being under an increasing level of pressure to switch states. We find that as a function of the few parameters of our model the collective switching from the flying to the landing state is indeed much sharper than the distribution of the individual landing intentions. The transition is accompanied by a number of interesting features discussed in this report.

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Cited by in corpus (21)

• Collective motion
• Active Brownian Particles. From Individual to Collective Stochastic Dynamics
• The Role of Projection in the Control of Bird Flocks
• Traffic jams, gliders, and bands in the quest for collective motion
• Cluster dynamics and cluster size distributions in systems of self-propelled particles
• Motility-induced phase separation of active particles in the presence of velocity alignment
• Collective motion of groups of self-propelled particles following interacting leaders
• Imitation Combined with a Characteristic Stimulus Duration Results in Robust Collective Decision-making in Sheep
• Polar vs. apolar alignment in systems of polar self-propelled particles
• Density regulation in strictly metric-free swarms
• Promoting collective motion of self-propelled agents by distance-based influence
• Flocking: Influence of Metric Versus Topological Interactions
• Milling and meandering: Flocking dynamics of stochastically interacting agents with a field of view
• Differentiating swarming models by mimicking a frustrated anti-Ferromagnet
• Model flocks in a steady vortical flow
• Landing together: how flocks arrive at a coherent action in time and space in the presence of perturbations
• Noise-induced vortex reversal of self-propelled particles
• Penguin huddling: a continuum model
• Flocking at the edge of chaos
• Aggregation of self-propelled particles with sensitivity to local order
• Collective motion of oscillatory walkers