Collective behavior of interacting self-propelled particles

We discuss biologically inspired, inherently non-equilibrium models of self-propelled particles, in which the particles interact with their neighbors by choosing at each time step the local average direction of motion. We summarize some of the results of large-scale simulations and theoretical approaches about the effects of noise and dimensionality on the scaling behavior of such systems. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.