Emergence of intelligent collective motion in a group of agents with memory

TL;DR

This paper investigates how memory in intelligent agents influences collective movement, revealing that longer memory promotes lane formation and reduces jamming in opposing pedestrian flows.

Contribution

It introduces a model of agent memory affecting collective dynamics, showing non-monotonic effects and the emergence of lane formation in bidirectional movement.

Findings

Short-term memory leads to symmetric jamming.

Long-term memory enhances heterogeneity and lane formation.

Memory influences unjamming and flow efficiency.

Abstract

Intelligent agents collect and process information from their dynamically evolving neighbourhood to efficiently navigate through it. However, agent-level intelligence does not guarantee that at the level of a collective; a common example is the jamming we observe in traffic flows. In this study, we ask: how and when do the interactions between intelligent agents translate to desirable or intelligent collective outcomes? We explore this question in the context of a bidisperse crowd of agents with opposing desired directions of movement, like in a pedestrian crossing. We model a facet of intelligence, viz. memory, where the agents remember how well they were able to travel in their desired directions and make up for their non-optimal past. We find that memory has a non-monotonic effect on the dynamics of the collective. When memory is short term, the local rearrangement of the agents lead to the formation of symmetrically jammed arrangements, which take longer to unjam. However, when agents remember across longer time-scales, we find that the dynamics of an agent becomes sensitive to the relatively small differences in the history of the nearby agents. This gives rise to heterogeneity in the movement that causes agents to unjam more readily and form lanes that ease the movement.