Emergent behaviors of the Cucker–Smale ensemble under attractive–repulsive couplings and Rayleigh frictions

Abstract

In this paper, we revisit an interaction problem of two homogeneous Cucker–Smale (in short CS) ensembles with attractive–repulsive couplings, possibly under the effect of Rayleigh friction, and study three sufficient frameworks leading to bi-cluster flocking in which two sub-ensembles evolve to two clusters departing from each other. In the previous literature, the interaction problem has been studied in the context of attractive couplings. In our interaction problem, inter-ensemble and intra-ensemble couplings are assumed to be repulsive and attractive, respectively. When the Rayleigh frictional forces are turned on, we show that the total kinetic energy is uniformly bounded so that spatially mixed initial configurations evolve toward the bi-cluster configuration asymptotically fast under some suitable conditions on system parameters, communication weight functions and initial configurations. In contrast, when Rayleigh frictional forces are turned off, the flocking analysis is more delicate mainly due to the possibility of an exponential growth of the kinetic energy. In this case, we employ two mutually disjoint frameworks with constant inter-ensemble communication function and exponentially localized inter-ensemble communication functions, respectively, and prove the bi-clustering phenomenon in both cases. This work extends the previous work on the interaction problem of CS ensembles. We also conduct several numerical experiments and compare them with our theoretical results.