Honest signaling in the cooperative search

Abstract

We consider a foraging by a group of agents acting in heterogeneous environment, and suggest a new model of cooperative foraging, which implements biological signaling. In the model, the individual foraging follows Brownian walks and the Levy flights with the varying parameters with respect to the observed states of the environment, and communication between the agents and their aggregation is defined on the basis of the Sir Philip Sidney game, which models the honest communication between animals. In our simulation, we find that a group of Brownian foragers with signaling behaves similarly to the group of Levy flyers without signaling, and the resulting cooperative foraging outperforms the known models of foraging without signaling. We argue that it provides a simple yet competitive description of the observed behavior of the foraging animals.