Brief Announcement: Distributed Task Allocation in Ant Colonies

Overview & Synopsis

A common problem in both distributed computing and insect biology is designing a model that accurately captures the behavior of a given distributed system or an ant colony, respectively. While the challenges involved in modeling computer systems and ant colonies are quite different from each other, a common approach is to explore multiple variations of different models and compare the results in terms of the simplicity of the model and the quality of the results. We consider the task allocation problem as a case study and explore multiple models inspired from both distributed computing and biological experiments. We compare the models with respect to their significance in understanding real ant behavior and also their technical relevance to distributed computing.