Schelling model of cell segregation based only on local information

Abstract: While biological studies suggest that motility of cells is involved in cell segregation, few computational models have investigated this mechanism. We apply a simple Schelling model, modified to reflect biological conditions, demonstrating how differences in cell motility arising exclusively from differences in the composition of the local environment can be sufficient to drive segregation. The work presented here demonstrates that the segregation behavior observed in the original Schelling model is robust to a relaxation of the requirement for global information and that the Schelling model may yield insight in the context of biological systems. In the model, the time course of cell segregation follows a power law in accord with experimental observations and previous work.