Capturing pattern bi-stability dynamics in delay-coupled swarms

Abstract

Swarms of large numbers of agents appear in many biological and engineering fields. Dynamic bi-stability of co-existing spatio-temporal patterns has been observed in many models of large population swarms. However, many reduced models for analysis, such as mean-field (MF), do not capture the bifurcation structure of bi-stable behavior. Here, we develop a new model for the dynamics of a large population swarm with delayed coupling. The additional physics predicts how individual particle dynamics affects the motion of the entire swarm. Specifically, 1) we correct the center-of-mass propulsion physics accounting for the particles' velocity distribution; 2) we show that the model we develop is able to capture the pattern bi-stability displayed by the full swarm model