Distributed Coordination of Resources via Wasp-Like Agents

Agent-based approaches to scheduling have gained increas- ing attention in recent years. One inherent advantage of agent-based approaches is their tendency for robust behavior; since activity is coordi- nated via local interaction protocols and decision policies, the system is insensitive to unpredictability in the executing environment. At the same time, such "self-scheduling" systems presume that a coherent global be- havior will emerge from the local interactions of individual agents, and realizing this behavior remains a difficult problem. We draw on the adap- tive behavior of the natural multi-agent system of the wasp colony as inspiration for decentralized mechanisms for coordinating factory oper- ations. We compare the resulting systems to the state-of-the-art for the problems examined.