Optimal Control through Leadership of the Cucker and Smale Flocking Model with Time Delays

Abstract

The Cucker and Smale model is a well-known flocking model that describes the emergence of flocks based on alignment. The first part focuses on investigating this model, including the effect of time delay and the presence of a leader. Furthermore, the control function is inserted into the dynamics of a leader to drive a group of agents to target. In the second part of this work, leadership-based optimal control is investigated. Moreover, the existence of the first-order optimality conditions for a delayed optimal control problem is discussed. Furthermore, the Runge-Kutta discretization method and the nonlinear conjugate gradient method are employed to solve the discrete optimality system. Finally, the capacity of the proposed control approach to drive a group of agents to reach the desired places or track the trajectory is demonstrated by numerical experiment results.