2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Collective motion, epitomized by the fascinating spectacle of birds flocking in unison or fish moving cohesively through the depths of the ocean, has captivated the human imagination for centuries. Beyond its aesthetic allure, this natural phenomenon demonstrates self-organization, where order arises from disorder without centralized control. This self-organizing principle finds equivalents in physical phenomena such as phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking and has also significant implications in biology, chemistry, robotics, and even social sciences.
As part of an interdisciplinary undergraduate student project at the intersection of physics, mathematics and computer programming, student teams were given the opportunity to immerse themselves into the world of self-organization and swarm behavior. Two models, the Vicsek and the Boids model, were used to simulate swarm behavior.
The Vicsek model is a simple, mathematically rigorous approach rooted in statistical physics, while the Boids model emphasizes the behavioral aspect of collective motion, making it suitable for creating realistic animations and simulations of swarm behavior. In addition, it can be extended to include obstacles and environmental factors that affect the swarm behavior.
The task of our students was to develop ̶ as a team of three ̶ a computer program in C#, in which both models are implemented and visualized. Teamwork was an additional challenge, as organizational skills were required in addition to the underlying task, such as holding meetings with collaborative decision-making, and an appropriate division of labor in the development of the software.
The resulting computer program with an intuitively designed user interface allows the simulation of different scenarios due to a variety of adjustable parameters. The visual output of the program reflects the different model assumptions and thus promotes the understanding of model building in general and of self-organization and swarm behavior in particular. The program is freely available and can be downloaded from our institution’s home page.