Modelling interactions between active and passive agents moving through heterogeneous environments
This work provides a modeling framework for understanding mixed agent systems, but the results are qualitative and lack concrete performance numbers, making it an incremental contribution.
The authors study mixed populations of active (directed) and passive (undirected) agents moving through heterogeneous environments, showing that the interplay between populations strongly affects residence times. They present two models for qualitative analysis and discuss mathematical well-posedness.
We study the dynamics of interacting agents from two distinct inter-mixed populations: One population includes active agents that follow a predetermined velocity field, while the second population contains exclusively passive agents, i.e. agents that have no preferred direction of motion. The orientation of their local velocity is affected by repulsive interactions with the neighboring agents and environment. We present two models that allow for a qualitative analysis of these mixed systems. We show that the residence times of this type of systems containing mixed populations is strongly affected by the interplay between these two populations. After showing our modeling and simulation results, we conclude with a couple of mathematical aspects concerning the well-posedness of our models.