Emergent dynamics of the cucker–Smale flocking model and its variants

Abstract

In this chapter, we present the Cucker–Smale-type flocking models and discuss their mathematical structures and flocking theorems in terms of coupling strength, interaction topologies, and initial data. In 2007, two mathematicians Felipe Cucker and Steve Smale introduced a second-order particle model which resembles Newton’s equations in N-body system and present how their simple model can exhibit emergent flocking behavior under sufficient conditions expressed only in terms of parameters and initial data. After Cucker–Smale’s seminal works in [31, 32], their model has received lots of attention from applied math and control engineering communities. We discuss the state of the art for the flocking theorems to Cucker–Smale-type flocking models.