Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Emergent spatial coordination among a group of adaptively crowd-avoiding agents

Ann Mary Mathew

Assumption College, Changanassery, Kerala

Complex systems set in the context of competitive resource allocation often exhibit special emergent features. The classic El Farol bar problem traces the emergence of cooperation in a competitive environment and its binary version, Minority Game, is often used to analyse the impact of information on emergence. The situations in which agents compete for physical space as a limited resource while displaying crowd-avoidance behavior, are particularly intriguing due to the promising yet unexplored nature of the area.

In this talk, I introduce a specific model where the agents are dispersed on a lattice and follow a simple relocation mechanism (win-stay-lose-shift) as part of the spatial competition to enhance personal payoff. Two parameters - neighborhood size and tolerance threshold - define the level of local crowding experienced by the agents. Agents access information about the occupancy of sites up to a distance called the information radius. The evolutionary dynamics originate from the repeated relocation of agents to vacant sites within the information radius in search of more comfortable spatial locations. Some of the relevant questions are about the level of self-organization achieved by the competing agents, the carrying capacity of the system and the influence of control parameters on the emergence within the model. I answer some of these questions based on the numerical results obtained using agent-based modeling.