English

Boltzmann-type equations for multi-agent systems with label switching

Statistical Mechanics 2021-10-20 v4 Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a Boltzmann-type kinetic description of mass-varying interacting multi-agent systems. Our agents are characterised by a microscopic state, which changes due to their mutual interactions, and by a label, which identifies a group to which they belong. Besides interacting within and across the groups, the agents may change label according to a state-dependent Markov-type jump process. We derive general kinetic equations for the joint interaction/label switch processes in each group. For prototypical birth/death dynamics, we characterise the transient and equilibrium kinetic distributions of the groups via a Fokker-Planck asymptotic analysis. Then we introduce and analyse a simple model for the contagion of infectious diseases, which takes advantage of the joint interaction/label switch processes to describe quarantine measures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.15550,
  title  = {Boltzmann-type equations for multi-agent systems with label switching},
  author = {Nadia Loy and Andrea Tosin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.15550},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

26 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:40:37.797Z