A note on the Cucker-Smale model with time delay and communication failures

Abstract In this paper, we deal with a Cucker-Smale model with time-dependent time delay and communication failures. Namely, we investigate the situation in which the agents involved in a flocking process can possibly suspend the exchange of information among themselves at some times. Under a so-called Persistence Excitation Condition, we establish the exponential flocking for the considered model. The exponential decay estimates on the velocity diameters we obtain are independent of the number of agents, which is convenient especially when the number of agents becomes too large. Exponential decay estimates with decay rate depending on the number of agents appear instead in the case of pair-dependent time delays and non-universal interaction, i.e. not all the agents are able to exchange information among themselves. In this paper, we rather consider a universal interaction and the time delay functions do not depend on the pair of agents. The analysis is then extended to a model with distributed time delay, namely the time delay is not pointwise but the agents are influenced by the information received from the other components of the system in a certain time interval.