Speaker
Description
Foraging is a ubiquitous strategy employed by diverse species and organisms for collecting, accumulating, and consuming vital resources. Examples of this can be observed in various populations, from the intracellular environment where vesicles explore the cytoplasm, carrying resources to the lysosome for consumption, to a bumblebee hive where foragers explore the exterior in search of nectar and water. In both cases, resource search has a random component induced by the chaotic and turbulent environment, and the populations have a finite capacity to consume resources. In this talk, we will present a model that combines queuing processes and first-passage processes, motivated by foraging systems, to track the accumulation of resources as a product of the interplay between random delivery and consumption. The main objective is to shed light on the viability of the foraging strategy, assuming stochastic search and consumption. Finally, we will introduce novel results relating the spatial configuration of a 1D stochastic search process to the convergence to a steady-state number of resources in the queuing system.
