Title: Labour division in swarm intelligence for allocation problems: a survey

Authors: Renbin Xiao; Yingcong Wang

Addresses: School of Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, China ' School of Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, China

Abstract: Labour division in swarm intelligence provides a flexible task allocation method, which is enlightening to solve allocation problems in dynamic environment. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of labour division in swarm intelligence for allocation problems. Firstly, labour division is stated from the aspects of phenomena, patterns, characteristics and mechanisms, and then four kinds of labour division models, viz., group dynamics model, response threshold model, activator-inhibitor model and individual sorting model, are discussed. Based on the contrastive analysis and typical applications of these models, allocation problems are divided into continuous allocation problems and discrete allocation problems, and the key points of applying the stimulus-response way and the activation-inhibition way to these two types of problems are analysed. Furthermore, the research of labour division in optimisation algorithms and its advantages are discussed. Finally, some perspectives on the development trends of labour division are given as the concluding remarks of this paper.

Keywords: swarm intelligence; labour division; task allocation; flexibility; allocation problem.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2018.094186

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2018 Vol.12 No.2, pp.71 - 86

Received: 22 Dec 2016
Accepted: 28 Dec 2016
Published online: 22 Aug 2018 *

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