When doing nothing is something. How task allocation strategies compromise between flexibility, efficiency, and inactive agents

摘要: We expect that human organizations and cooperative animal groups should be optimized for collective performance. This often involves the allocation of different individuals to tasks. Social insect colonies are a prime example display sophisticated mechanisms task allocation. Here we discuss which strategies may adapted environmental social conditions. Effective robust is hard problem, in many biological engineered complex systems solved decentralized manner: benefit from insights into what makes group organization effective. In addition, find considerable variation among how much work they appear contribute, despite fact individual selfishness insects low optimization occurs largely at level. review possible explanations uneven workloads workers, including limitations on information collection or constraints efficiency, such as when there mismatch between frequency fluctuations demand speed workers can reallocated. These processes likely apply any system worker agents allocated tasks with fluctuating demand, therefore instructive understanding optimal inactive distributed system. Some these imply certain proportion an adaptive strategy organization.