Randomly Distributed Delayed Communication and Coherent Swarm Patterns

TL;DR

This paper investigates how randomly distributed communication delays influence pattern formation and stability in swarms of self-propelled agents, extending previous work on fixed delays to more realistic, stochastic delay scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces the analysis of randomly distributed delays in swarm models and examines their impact on pattern stability and state switching.

Findings

Random delay distributions affect pattern stability.

Increased delay variability influences switching probabilities.

Stability of coherent states depends on delay distribution characteristics.

Abstract

Previously we showed how delay communication between globally coupled self-propelled agents causes new spatio-temporal patterns to arise when the delay coupling is fixed among all agents \cite{Forgoston08}. In this paper, we show how discrete, randomly distributed delays affect the dynamical patterns. In particular, we investigate how the standard deviation of the time delay distribution affects the stability of the different patterns as well as the switching probability between coherent states.