Leadership through influence: what mechanisms allow leaders to steer a swarm?

TL;DR

This paper develops a continuous model to analyze how leaders influence swarm movement through mechanisms like orientation bias, speed, and conspicuousness, revealing conditions for successful steering.

Contribution

It introduces a novel continuous modeling framework that incorporates multiple leader influence mechanisms to understand swarm steering dynamics.

Findings

All three influence mechanisms can steer the swarm successfully.

Parameter choices critically affect steering success, with some leading to failure modes.

The model identifies conditions under which leaders effectively guide the swarm.

Abstract

Collective migration of cells and animals often relies on a specialised set of "leaders", whose role is to steer a population of naive followers towards some target. We formulate a continuous model to understand the dynamics and structure of such groups, splitting a population into separate follower and leader types with distinct orientation responses. We incorporate "leader influence" via three principal mechanisms: a bias in the orientation of leaders according to the destination, distinct speeds of movement and distinct levels of conspicuousness. Using a combination of analysis and numerical computation on a sequence of models of increasing complexity, we assess the extent to which leaders successfully shepherd the swarm. While all three mechanisms can lead to a successfully steered swarm, parameter regime is crucial with non successful choices generating a variety of unsuccessful attempts, including movement away from the target, swarm splitting or swarm dispersal.