Linear Nearest Neighbor Flocks with All Distinct Agents

TL;DR

This paper studies the complex dynamics of 1D agent arrays with unique, non-Newtonian linear couplings, extending previous models to analyze systems with all distinct agents and generalized boundary conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of linear 1D agent systems with all distinct agents and non-Newtonian interactions, extending previous models to more general boundary conditions.

Findings

Approximate global dynamics using low-frequency analysis.

Extended periodic boundary conditions provide quantitative insights.

Generalization to non-Newtonian, all-distinct-agent systems.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the global dynamics of 1-dimensional agent arrays with nearest neighbor linear couplings. The equations of motion are second order linear ODEs with constant coeffcients. The novel part of this research is that the couplings are different for each distinct agent. We allow the forces to depend on the positions and velocity (damping terms) but the magnitudes of both the position and velocity couplings are different for each agent. We, also, do not assume that the forces are "Newtonian" (i.e. the force due to A on B equals the minus the force of B on A) as this assumption does not apply to certain situations, such as traffic modeling. For example, driver A reacting to driver B does not imply the opposite reaction in driver B. There are no known analytical means to solve these systems, even though they are linear, and so relatively little is known about them. This paper is a generalization of previous work that computed the global dynamics of 1-dimensional sequences of identical agents [3] assuming periodic boundary conditions. In this paper, we push that method further, similar to [2], and use an extended periodic boundary condition to to gain quantitative insights to the systems under consideration. We find that we can approximate the global dynamics of such a system by carefully analyzing the low-frequency behavior of the system with (generalized) periodic boundary conditions.