Evaluation of Adaptive Nature Inspired Task Allocation Against Alternate Decentralised Multiagent Strategies

Adaptive multiagent algorithms based upon the behaviour of social insects are powerful decentralised systems capable of solving complex problems. The intelligence of such a system lies not within a single agent but is a product of a network of simple interactions. Under the context of a mail collection environment different techniques are implemented and evaluated. The paper creates a number of strategies to tackle task allocation problems of this type based upon the principles of self-organisation and greedy search. The paper also investigates factors that may affect their performance.