Labour division in swarm intelligence for allocation problems: a survey

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.