Costs of task allocation with local feedback: Effects of colony size and extra workers in social insects and other multi-agent systems.

ABSTRACT: Adaptive collective systems are common in biology and beyond. Typically, such systems require a task allocation algorithm: a mechanism or rule-set by which individuals select particular roles. Here we study the performance of such task allocation mechanisms measured in terms of the time for individuals to allocate to tasks. We ask: (1) Is task allocation fundamentally difficult, and thus costly? (2) Does the performance of task allocation mechanisms depend on the number of individuals? And (3) what other parameters may affect their efficiency? We use techniques from distributed computing theory to develop a model of a social insect colony, where workers have to be allocated to a set of tasks; however, our model is generalizable to other systems. We show, first, that the ability of workers

SUBMITTER: Radeva T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5746283 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature