No Arabic abstract
Swarm intelligence is widely recognized as a powerful paradigm of self-organized optimization, with numerous examples of successful applications in distributed artificial intelligence. However, the role of physical interactions in the organization of traffic flows in ants under crowded conditions has only been studied very recently. The related results suggest new ways of congestion control and simple algorithms for optimal resource usage based on local interactions and, therefore, decentralized control concepts. Here, we present a mathematical analysis of such a concept for an experiment with two alternative ways with limited capacities between a food source and the nest of an ant colony. Moreover, we carry out microscopic computer simulations for generalized setups, in which ants have more alternatives or the alternative ways are of different lengths. In this way and by variation of interaction parameters, we can get a better idea, how powerful congestion control based on local repulsive interactions may be. Finally, we will discuss potential applications of this design principle to routing in traffic or data networks and machine usage in supply systems.
Despite the vast amount of studies on pedestrian flow, the data concerning high densities are still very inadequate. We organize one large-scale pedestrian flow experiment on a ring corridor. With 278 participants, the density as high as 9 m^(-2) is reached. In the uni-directional flow, four different states are observed, including the free flow, congested state, over-congested state and hyper-congested state. The features of the hyper-congested state are similar to the crowd turbulence reported in the empirical data of Helbing et al., and the transition between the stopped state and the moving state can be found. The flow rates in the over-congested state are nearly constant, due to the downstream propagation of pedestrian clusters. In the bi-directional flow, three different types of lane formations are observed in the experiment: (1) three lanes are directly formed ; (2) two lanes are directly formed; (3) firstly three lanes are formed, and then they transit into two lanes. After the lane formation, some interesting phenomena have been observed, including the inhomogeneous distribution of pedestrians across the lanes, and the formation and dissipation of localized crowd. Our study is expected to help for better understanding and modeling the dynamics of high density pedestrian flow.
We study the Immediate Exchange model, recently introduced by Heinsalu and Patriarca [Eur. Phys. J. B 87: 170 (2014)], who showed by simulations that the wealth distribution in this model converges to a Gamma distribution with shape parameter $2$. Here we justify this conclusion analytically, in the infinite-population limit. An infinite-population version of the model is derived, describing the evolution of the wealth distribution in terms of iterations of a nonlinear operator on the space of probability densities. It is proved that the Gamma distributions with shape parameter $2$ are fixed points of this operator, and that, starting with an arbitrary wealth distribution, the process converges to one of these fixed points. We also discuss the mixed model introduced in the same paper, in which exchanges are either bidirectional or unidirectional with fixed probability. We prove that, although, as found by Heinsalu and Patriarca, the equilibrium distribution can be closely fit by Gamma distributions, the equilibrium distribution for this model is {it{not}} a Gamma distribution.
Here we study the emergence of spontaneous leadership in large populations. In standard models of opinion dynamics, herding behavior is only obeyed at the local scale due to the interaction of single agents with their neighbors; while at the global scale, such models are governed by purely diffusive processes. Surprisingly, in this paper we show that the combination of a strong separation of time scales within the population and a hierarchical organization of the influences of some agents on the others induces a phase transition between a purely diffusive phase, as in the standard case, and a herding phase where a fraction of the agents self-organize and lead the global opinion of the whole population.
Recent empirical studies suggest that heavy-tailed distributions of human activities are universal in real social dynamics [Muchnik, emph{et al.}, Sci. Rep. textbf{3}, 1783 (2013)]. On the other hand, community structure is ubiquitous in biological and social networks [M.~E.~J. Newman, Nat. Phys. textbf{8}, 25 (2012)]. Motivated by these facts, we here consider the evolutionary Prisoners dilemma game taking place on top of a real social network to investigate how the community structure and the heterogeneity in activity of individuals affect the evolution of cooperation. In particular, we account for a variation of the birth-death process (which can also be regarded as a proportional imitation rule from social point of view) for the strategy updating under both weak- and strong-selection (meaning the payoffs harvested from games contribute either slightly or heavily to the individuals performance). By implementing comparative studies, where the players are selected either randomly or in terms of their actual activities to playing games with their immediate neighbors, we figure out that heterogeneous activity benefits the emergence of collective cooperation in harsh environment (the action for cooperation is costly) under strong selection, while it impairs the formation of altruism under weak selection. Moreover, we find that the abundance of communities in the social network can evidently foster the fixation of cooperation under strong-selection, in contrast to the games evolving on the randomized counterparts. Our results are therefore helpful for us to better understand the evolution of cooperation in real social systems.
This study develops the epidemic hitting time (EHT) metric on graphs measuring the expected time an epidemic starting at node $a$ in a fully susceptible network takes to propagate and reach node $b$. An associated EHT centrality measure is then compared to degree, betweenness, spectral, and effective resistance centrality measures through exhaustive numerical simulations on several real-world network data-sets. We find two surprising observations: first, EHT centrality is highly correlated with effective resistance centrality; second, the EHT centrality measure is much more delocalized compared to degree and spectral centrality, highlighting the role of peripheral nodes in epidemic spreading on graphs.