An Ant-Based Algorithm for the Heterogeneous Dynamic Task Allocation Problem

An ant-based algorithm inspired by the division of labor in ant colonies is proposed and applied to the the solution of an online scheduling problem. A painting facility is considered for illustrating the problem: Trucks leave an assembly line to get painted in painting booths. The goal is to minimize the makespan, that is, the time needed for painting all given trucks. In this paper we propose an extension of the dynamic threshold model of Theraulaz et al. [8] which is designed for handling the case in which all booths are identical. In our extension we address the heterogeneous case in which different booths might require different processing times for completing a same task. The paper contains an empirical comparison of different insectbased algorithms for the problem discussed.