Self-Organized Fission-Fusion Control Algorithm for Flocking Systems Based on Intermittent Selective Interaction

Panpan Yang,Maode Yan,Jiacheng Song,Ye Tang

doi:10.1155/2019/2187812

Abstract

In nature, gregarious animals, insects, or bacteria usually exhibit paradoxical behaviors in the form of group fission and fusion, which exerts an important influence on group’s pattern formation, information transfer, and epidemiology. However, the fission-fusion dynamics have received little attention compared to other flocking behavior. In this paper, an intermittent selective interaction based control algorithm for the self-organized fission-fusion behavior of flocking system is proposed, which bridges the gap between the two conflicting behaviors in a unified fashion. Specifically, a hybrid velocity coordination strategy that includes both the egalitarian and selective interactions is proposed, where the egalitarian interaction is to maintain the flock’s order and achieve the fusion behavior while the selective interaction strategy is for the response to external stimulus information and generates the fission behavior. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed control algorithm can realize the self-organized fission-fusion behavior of flocking system under a unified framework. The influences of the main control parameters on the performance of the fission-fusion behavior are also discussed. In particular, the trade-off parameterαbalances the exploration (fission) and exploitation (fusion) behaviors of flocking system and significantly enhances its movement flexibility and environmental adaptivity.

Highlights

In nature, gregarious animals, insects, or bacteria often aggregate into a cohesive group to gain some survival advantages, such as reducing predation risk, improving foraging efficiency, and saving individual energy [1,2,3,4]
A group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can gather into a cohesive flock to carpet bomb enemy’s targets and split into smaller clusters to avoid the attack of anti-aircraft fire
The autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) swarm that is executing the seabed exploration task may aggregate into a small group to go across the narrow tunnel and expand to its original state to monitor the mission area

Summary

Introduction

Gregarious animals, insects, or bacteria often aggregate into a cohesive group to gain some survival advantages, such as reducing predation risk, improving foraging efficiency, and saving individual energy [1,2,3,4]. A zonal model was proposed in [12], which is able to produce some typical collective behaviors (such as swarm, torus, dynamic parallel, and highly dynamic parallel group) by adjusting certain parameters These works mainly deploy the egalitarian interaction method and focus on the group fusion aspect; little attention has been paid to the fission behavior. Inspired by the above empirical evidences, an intermittent selective interaction based control algorithm is proposed for the self-organized fission-fusion behavior of flocking system.

Problem Formulation

Simulation Studies

Discussion

Conclusions and Future Work