TY - JOUR
T1 - When doing nothing is something. How task allocation strategies compromise between flexibility, efficiency, and inactive agents
AU - Charbonneau, Daniel
AU - Dornhaus, Anna
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the entire Dornhaus lab for their help in discussing and strengthening the ideas explored herein, and for their ongoing feedback. We also thank Jennifer Fewell for organizing a special issue of the Journal of Bioeconomics on biomimicry as well as for her feedback and support. Research supported through the GIDP-EIS and EEB Department at University of Arizona, as well as NSF grants no. IOS-1045239, IOS- 1455983, and DEB- 1262292 (to A.D.).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York.
PY - 2015/10/26
Y1 - 2015/10/26
N2 - We expect that human organizations and cooperative animal groups should be optimized for collective performance. This often involves the allocation of different individuals to different tasks. Social insect colonies are a prime example of cooperative animal groups that display sophisticated mechanisms of task allocation. Here we discuss which task allocation strategies may be adapted to which environmental and social conditions. Effective and robust task allocation is a hard problem, and in many biological and engineered complex systems is solved in a decentralized manner: human organizations may benefit from insights into what makes decentralized strategies of group organization effective. In addition, we often find considerable variation among individuals in how much work they appear to contribute, despite the fact that individual selfishness in social insects is low and optimization occurs largely at the group level. We review possible explanations for uneven workloads among workers, including limitations on individual information collection or constraints of task allocation efficiency, such as when there is a mismatch between the frequency of fluctuations in demand for work and the speed at which workers can be reallocated. These processes are likely to apply to any system in which worker agents are allocated to tasks with fluctuating demand, and should therefore be instructive to understanding optimal task allocation and inactive workers in any distributed system. Some of these processes imply that a certain proportion of inactive workers can be an adaptive strategy for collective organization.
AB - We expect that human organizations and cooperative animal groups should be optimized for collective performance. This often involves the allocation of different individuals to different tasks. Social insect colonies are a prime example of cooperative animal groups that display sophisticated mechanisms of task allocation. Here we discuss which task allocation strategies may be adapted to which environmental and social conditions. Effective and robust task allocation is a hard problem, and in many biological and engineered complex systems is solved in a decentralized manner: human organizations may benefit from insights into what makes decentralized strategies of group organization effective. In addition, we often find considerable variation among individuals in how much work they appear to contribute, despite the fact that individual selfishness in social insects is low and optimization occurs largely at the group level. We review possible explanations for uneven workloads among workers, including limitations on individual information collection or constraints of task allocation efficiency, such as when there is a mismatch between the frequency of fluctuations in demand for work and the speed at which workers can be reallocated. These processes are likely to apply to any system in which worker agents are allocated to tasks with fluctuating demand, and should therefore be instructive to understanding optimal task allocation and inactive workers in any distributed system. Some of these processes imply that a certain proportion of inactive workers can be an adaptive strategy for collective organization.
KW - Decentralized complex systems
KW - Inactivity
KW - Organization of work
KW - Resource allocation
KW - Social insects
KW - Task allocation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84942294740&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84942294740&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10818-015-9205-4
DO - 10.1007/s10818-015-9205-4
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84942294740
SN - 1387-6996
VL - 17
SP - 217
EP - 242
JO - Journal of Bioeconomics
JF - Journal of Bioeconomics
IS - 3
ER -