Determining interaction rules in animal swarms

In this paper, we introduce a method for determining local interaction rules in animal swarms. The method is based on the assumption that the behavior of individuals in a swarm can be treated as a set of mechanistic rules.The principal idea behind the technique is to vary parameters that define a set of hypothetical interactions, as for example, a rule for aligning with neighbors. The parameter values are optimized so that the deviation between the observed movements in an animal swarm and the movements predicted by the assumed rule set is minimal. We demonstrate the method by reconstructing the interaction rules from the trajectories produced by a computer simulation. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.