EFFECTS OF AGENT'S REPULSION IN 2D FLOCKING MODELS

Abstract

In nature many animal groups, such as fish schools or bird flocks, clearly display structural order and appear to move as a single coherent entity. In order to understand the complex behavior of these systems, many models have been proposed and tested so far. This paper deals with an extension of the Vicsek model, by including a second zone of repulsion, where each agent attempts to maintain a minimum distance from the others. The consideration of this zone in our study seems to play an important role during the travel of agents in the two-dimensional (2D) flocking models. Our numerical investigations show that depending on the basic ingredients such as repulsion radius (R1), effect of density of agents (ρ) and noise (η), our nonequilibrium system can undergo a kinetic phase transition from no transport to finite net transport. For different values of ρ, kinetic phase diagrams in the plane (η ,R1) are found. Implications of these findings are discussed.