A Numerical Study of the Stochastic Cucker-Smale Flocking Model

We consider the influence of white noise on achieving consensus in a stochastic version of the well known Cucker-Smale model for flocking in multi-agent swarm systems. Our main results based on extensive numerical simulations suggest that while low intensity white noise has little appreciable effects on convergence to consensus in the system, the presence of high intensity white noise can fundamentally alter the flocking characteristics of the model. In particular, our results indicate that the numerical upper bound on a critical system parameter value that guarantees flocking in the deterministic model is no longer valid in the presence of high intensity white noise. In addition, the results also suggest that, interestingly, the influence of noise is independent of the number of agents in the swarm. Finally, we suggest a novel approach using the classical Fokker-Planck formalism as a direction of further analytical work aimed at validating our numerical results.