Resilience and Robustness in Ecological Distributed Decision-Making Dynamics
Abstract
Animal groups and other organismal aggregations succeed in challenging tasks, such as migration, foraging, and predator evasion, which require that they make group decisions with speed, accuracy, and efficiency. It has long been appreciated that these groups do so despite limitations on an individual s capabilities, despite significant uncertainty in an individual s perception of its surroundings, and despite possibly severe disturbances and changes in the environment. Through social interactions, the group becomes more than the sum of its parts, and research has advanced to uncover fundamental principles of collective behavior, to leverage these principles in the management of ecological systems, and to emulate these principles in the design of groups of interacting agents. However, what makes ecological groups so remarkably resilient to changes in the environment and robust to uncertainty and disturbances and how these groups have evolved to become so, is still not well understood. This project will address the challenges and will advance state-of-the-art science by developing mathematical models and analytical methods to examine rigorously and systematically the central role of the complex interactions among individuals in the group, including multiple spatial and temporal scales and a range of features that may be heterogeneously distributed across the group. The ability of the group to manage uncertainty successfully and respond to changes in the environment will be investigated in terms of the influence of social interactions that change. For example, as animals move relative to one another, and by social interactions that are multilayer. For example, as animals use different senses for different kinds of interactions, such as long-range sensing to assess a possibly new foraging patch and short-range sensing to assess the current foraging patch.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 11, 2018
- Source ID
- W911NF1810325
Entities
People
- Naomi Ehrich Leonard
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Princeton University
- United States Army