The mechanism of schooling behavior of fish has been studied mainly from the ecoIogical viewpoint. With the development of marine ranching, this subject becomes more important both for fishery resource management and for controlof fish behavior. In this report, We consider the mechanism of fish behavior from another viewpoint, i.e., system engineering approach. In system engineering, modeling and simulation techniques are used for analysis, design and plaming of not only technical but also non-technical systems. The result obtained by computer simulation may be expected to give us a new suggestion for considering the problem. This report deals with a fish school as an autonomous decentralized system, which is one of recent interesting subjects in system engineering. A water tank experiment is carried out to obtain an observation data for fish behavior and to know a special feature of school. The unknown parameters included in the model are estimated by using a water tank experiment data. The relationship between the autonomous decentralized mechanism and fish behavior is investigated from simulation results.
