Collective Movement with Signaling

TL;DR

This paper models collective movement with signaling, showing how noise and the fraction of informed individuals influence phase transitions, group coherence, and environmental inference in mobile agent populations.

Contribution

It introduces a model combining noisy environmental observation, signaling, and movement alignment, revealing complex phase behaviors and the impact of communication noise.

Findings

Discontinuous phase transition occurs with low informed fraction and increased communication noise.

High informed fraction allows smooth transition without phase change.

Noise in signal production more negatively affects group coherence than comprehension noise.

Abstract

We consider a population of mobile agents able to make noisy observation of the environment and communicate their observation by production and comprehension of signals. Individuals try to align their movement direction with their neighbors. Besides, they try to collectively find and travel towards an environmental direction. We show that, when the fraction of informed individuals is small, by increasing the noise in communication, similarly to the Viscek model, the model shows a discontinuous order-disorder transition with strong finite size effects. In contrast, for large fraction of informed individuals, it is possible to go from the ordered phase to the disordered phase without passing any phase transition. The ordered phase is composed of two phases separated by a discontinuous transition. Informed collective motion, in which the population collectively infers the correct environmental direction, occurs for high fraction of informed individuals. When the fraction of informed individuals is low, misinformed collective motion, where the population fails to find the environmental direction becomes stable as well. Besides, we show that an amount of noise in the production of signals is more detrimental for the inference capability of the population, and increases the density fluctuations and the probability of group fragmentation, compared to the same amount of noise in the comprehension.