Collective motion

We review the observations and the basic laws describing the essential aspects of collective motion - being one of the most common and spectacular manifestation of coordinated behavior. Our aim is to provide a balanced discussion of the various facets of this highly multidisciplinary field, including experiments, mathematical methods and models for simulations, so that readers with a variety of background could get both the basics and a broader, more detailed picture of the field. The observations we report on include systems consisting of units ranging from macromolecules through metallic rods and robots to groups of animals and people. Some emphasis is put on models that are simple and realistic enough to reproduce the numerous related observations and are useful for developing concepts for a better understanding of the complexity of systems consisting of many simultaneously moving entities. As such, these models allow the establishing of a few fundamental principles of flocking. In particular, it is demonstrated, that in spite of considerable differences, a number of deep analogies exist between equilibrium statistical physics systems and those made of self-propelled (in most cases living) units. In both cases only a few well defined macroscopic/collective states occur and the transitions between these states follow a similar scenario, involving discontinuity and algebraic divergences. © 2012 Elsevier B.V

A multi-lane TASEP model for crossing pedestrian traffic flows

A one-way {\em street} of width M is modeled as a set of M parallel one-dimensional TASEPs. The intersection of two perpendicular streets is a square lattice of size M times M. We consider hard core particles entering each street with an injection probability \alpha. On the intersection square the hard core exclusion creates a many-body problem of strongly interacting TASEPs and we study the collective dynamics that arises. We construct an efficient algorithm that allows for the simulation of streets of infinite length, which have sharply defined critical jamming points. The algorithm employs the `frozen shuffle update', in which the randomly arriving particles have fully deterministic bulk dynamics. High precision simulations for street widths up to M=24 show that when \alpha increases, there occur jamming transitions at a sequence of M critical values \alphaM,M < \alphaM,M-1 < ... < \alphaM,1. As M grows, the principal transition point \alphaM,M decreases roughly as \sim 1/(log M) in the range of M values studied. We show that a suitable order parameter is provided by a reflection coefficient associated with the particle current in each TASEP.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figure