Self-Stabilizing Task Allocation In Spite of Noise

Abstract

We study the problem of distributed task allocation inspired by the behavior of social insects, which perform task allocation in a setting of limited capabilities and noisy environment feedback. We assume that each task has a demand that should be satisfied but not exceeded, i.e., there is an optimal number of ants that should be working on this task at a given time. The goal is to assign a near-optimal number of workers to each task in a distributed manner and without explicit access to the values of the demands nor the number of ants working on the task. We seek to answer the question of how the quality of task allocation depends on the accuracy of assessing whether too many (overload) or not enough (lack) ants are currently working on a given task. Concretely, we address the open question of solving task allocation in the model where each ant receives feedback that depends on the deficit defined as the (possibly negative) difference between the optimal demand and the current number of workers in the task. The feedback is modeled as a random variable that takes value lack or overload with probability given by a sigmoid of the deficit. Each ants receives the feedback independently, but the higher the overload or lack of workers for a task, the more likely it is that all the ants will receive the same, correct feedback from this task; the closer the deficit is to zero, the less reliable the feedback becomes. We measure the performance of task allocation algorithms using the notion of regret, defined as the absolute value of the deficit summed over all tasks and summed over time. We propose a simple, constant-memory, self-stabilizing, distributed algorithm that quickly converges from any initial distribution to a near-optimal assignment. We also show that our algorithm works not only under stochastic noise but also in an adversarial noise setting.