Existence of piecewise weak solutions of a discrete Cucker-Smale's flocking model with a singular communication weight (Q399951)

The classical discrete Cucker-Smale flocking model describes the collective self-driven motion of \(N\) particles with the tendency to flock, such as flocking of birds, schooling of fish, swarming of insects etc. If \(x_i( t) \) is the position of the \(i\)-th particle at time \(t\), then the model is given by the second-order differential system \[ x_{i}^{\prime \prime }=\frac{1}{N} \sum\limits_{j=1}^N\psi(| x_j-x_i|)( x_j^\prime-x_i^\prime), \] \(i=1,2,\dots ,N\), where \(\psi \) is a given function called the communication weight. The present paper is a fine analysis of the existence of solutions to the initial-value problem with the singular communication weight \(\psi \left( s\right) =s^{-\alpha },\) \(0<\alpha <1.\) This is achieved by an approximation procedure based on the replacement of \(\psi \) by smooth and bounded approximants.