Optimal control of the discrete-time fractional-order Cucker-Smale model (Q1678313)

The discrete time system \[ \begin{aligned} x_i(t + h) - x_i(t) & = hv_i(t) \cr v_i(t + h) - v_i(t) & = h\sum_{j=1}^N a_{ij} (v_j(t) - v_i(t)) \quad i = 1, \dots, N \end{aligned} \eqno(1) \] where \(x_i(t), v_i(t) \in {\mathbb R}^d\) and \[ a_{ij} = {c \over (1 + \|x_i - x_j\|^2)^\beta} \] \((c >0, \beta \geq 0, \|\cdot\|\) the \(\ell^2\) norm of \({\mathbb R}^d)\) has been proposed by F. Cucker and S. Smale to model emerging collective behavior in interacting groups. Its continuous time counterpart is the system \[ \begin{aligned} x'_i(t) & = v_i(t) \cr v'_i(t) & = \sum_{j=1}^N a_{ij}(v_j(t) - v_i(t)) \quad i = 1, \dots, N \, . \end{aligned}\eqno(2) \] Cucker and Smale proved that if \(\beta <1/2\) the \(v_i(t)\) converge as \(t \to \infty\) to a common limit \(\bar v \in {\mathbb R}^d\) independent of the initial conditions (the consensus value) while if \(\beta \geq 1/2\) additional assumptions on the initial conditions are needed. In the continuous case (2), M. Caponigro, M. Fornasier, B. Piccoli and E. Trelat considered the case where the system does not converge to a consensus and used an external control \(u_i(t)\) added to the second line of (2); the trajectory minimizes \[ \int_0^T \bigg(\sum_{i=1}^N \Big\|v_i(t) - {1 \over N}\sum_{j=1}^N v_j(t) \Big \|^2 + \gamma \sum_{i=1}^N\|u_i(t)\| \bigg) dt \eqno(3) \] under a boundedness condition on the control. In this paper, the authors apply the external control strategy to the a version of the discrete system (1) where fractional order differences are used to model memory effects; the cost functional is a discrete analogue of (3). The main result is a version of Pontryagin's maximum principle for the discrete problem.