Preliminary results on the herdability of complex multiagent systems via local information

Abstract: We present preliminary results on the problem of driving the dynamics of a group of agents, the herders, so as to steer the collective behaviour of another group of agents, the targets, interacting with them. We define this problem as the multiagent herding control problem and study the herdability of the target agents by relaxing some strong assumptions often made in the existing literature, namely that targets are cohesive in the absence of herders and that herders possess global information. We find that scaling laws exist linking crucial parameters such as the herders' sensing radius and the targets density with the herdability of the system. Our most surprising observation, supported by exhaustive numerical experiments, is that the crucial effect of limited sensing is that the minimum number of herders required to solve the problem significantly increases below a critical minimum density of the target agents.