The combined effect of attraction and orientation zones in 2D flocking models

Abstract

In nature, many animal groups, such as fish schools or bird flocks, clearly display structural order and appear to move as a single coherent entity. In order to understand the complex motion of these systems, we study the Vicsek model of self-propelled particles (SPP) which is an important tool to investigate the behavior of collective motion of live organisms. This model reproduces the biological behavior patterns in the two-dimensional (2D) space. Within the framework of this model, the particles move with the same absolute velocity and interact locally in the zone of orientation by trying to align their direction with that of the neighbors. In this paper, we model the collective movement of SPP using an agent-based model which follows biologically motivated behavioral rules, by adding a second region called the attraction zone, where each particles move towards each other avoiding being isolated. Our main goal is to present a detailed numerical study on the effect of the zone of attraction on the kinetic phase transition of our system. In our study, the consideration of this zone seems to play an important role in the cohesion. Consequently, in the directional orientation, the zone that we added forms the compact particle group. In our simulation, we show clearly that the model proposed here can produce two collective behavior patterns: torus and dynamic parallel group. Implications of these findings are discussed.