Density Control of Interacting Agent Systems

In this article, we consider the problem of controlling the group behavior of a large number of dynamic systems that are constantly interacting with each other. These systems are assumed to have identical dynamics (e.g., flocks of birds, UAV swarms) and their group behavior can be modeled by a distribution. Thus, this problem can be viewed as an optimal control problem over the space of distributions. We propose a novel algorithm to compute a feedback control strategy so that, when adopted by the agents, the distribution of them would be transformed from an initial one to a target one over a finite-time window. Our method is built on the optimal transport theory but differs significantly from existing work in this area in that our method models the interactions among agents explicitly. From an algorithmic point of view, our algorithm is based on the generalized proximal gradient descent algorithm and has a convergence guarantee with a sublinear rate. We further extend our framework to account for the scenarios where the agents are from multiple species. In the linear quadratic setting, the solution is characterized by a system of coupled Riccati equations, which can be solved in closed form. Finally, several numerical examples are presented to illustrate our framework.