Trends to equilibrium for a nonlocal Fokker–Planck equation

Abstract

We obtain equilibration rates for a one-dimensional nonlocal Fokker–Planck equation with time-dependent diffusion coefficient and drift, modeling the relaxation of a large swarm of robots, feeling each other in terms of their distance, towards the steady profile characterized by uniform spreading over a finite interval of the line. The result follows by combining entropy methods for quantifying the decay of the solution towards its quasi-stationary distribution, with the properties of the quasi-stationary profile.