Reduced-Order Model Predictive Control of a Fish Schooling Model

Abstract: We study the problem of model predictive control (MPC) for the fish schooling model proposed by Gautrais et al. (Annales Zoologici Fennici, 2008). The high nonlinearity of the model attributed to its attraction/alignment/repulsion law suggests the need to use MPC for controlling the fish schooling's motion. However, for large schools, the hybrid nature of the law can make it numerically demanding to perform finite-horizon optimizations in MPC. Therefore, this paper proposes reducing the fish schooling model for numerically efficient MPC; the reduction is based on using the weighted average of the directions of individual fish in the school. We analytically show how using the normalized eigenvector centrality of the alignment-interaction network can yield a better reduction by comparing reduction errors. We confirm this finding on the weight and numerical efficiency of the MPC with the reduced-order model by numerical simulations. The proposed reduction allows us to control a school with up to 500 individuals. Further, we confirm that reduction with the normalized eigenvector centrality allows us to improve the control accuracy by factor of five when compared to that using constant weights.