An altruistic resource-sharing mechanism for synchronization: The energy-speed-accuracy tradeoff

Abstract: Synchronization among a group of active agents is ubiquitous in nature. Although synchronization based on direct interactions between agents described by the Kuramoto model is well understood, the other general mechanism based on indirect interactions among agents sharing limited resources are less known. Here, we propose a minimal thermodynamically consistent model for the altruistic resource-sharing (ARS) mechanism wherein resources are needed for individual agent to advance but a more advanced agent has a lower competence to obtain resources. We show that while differential competence in ARS mechanism provides a negative feedback leading to synchronization it also breaks detailed balance and thus requires additional energy dissipation besides the cost of driving individual agents. By solving the model analytically, our study reveals a general tradeoff relation between the total energy dissipation rate and the two key performance measures of the system: average speed and synchronization accuracy. For a fixed dissipation rate, there is a distinct speed-accuracy Pareto front traversed by the scarcity of resources: scarcer resources lead to slower speed but more accurate synchronization. Increasing energy dissipation eases this tradeoff by pushing the speed-accuracy Pareto front outwards. The connections of our work to realistic biological systems such as the KaiABC system in cyanobacterial circadian clock and other theoretical results based on thermodynamic uncertainty relation are also discussed.