Adaptive Task Allocation Inspired by a Model of Division of Labor in Social Insects

Social insects provide us with a powerful metaphor to create decentralized systems of simple interacting, and often mobile, agents. The emergent collective intelligence of social insects – swarm intelligence – resides not in complex individual abilities but rather in networks of interactions that exist among individuals and between individuals and their environment. In particular, a recently proposed model of division of labor in a colony of primitively eusocial wasps, based on a simple reinforcement of response thresholds, can be transformed into a decentralized adaptive algorithm of task allocation. An application of such an algorithm is proposed in the context of a mail company, but virtually any type of flexible task allocation can be described within the same framework.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: BCEC
• Authors: Eric Bonabeau, Andrej Sobkowski, Guy Theraulaz, Jean-Louis Deneubourg
• Keywords: Applied Computing, BCEC 1997, Emergent Collective Intelligence, Social Insects, Task Allocation