TASK ALLOCATION
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 3492 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Human sciences |
- “The global process by which a group, organization or society assesses its current needs and ”assigns“ a certain number of members to perform specific tasks” (Adapted from D.M. GORDON, 1995, p.50).
D.M. GORDON found that, in insect societies, task allocation is a “distributed process”, each individual being able to “perform any of a number of tasks”, according to local and temporal circumstances. This seems to result from an interactive perception of global environmental situations. The introduction by GORDON of external disturbances in an ant nest increased or decreased the number of individuals performing some specific tasks, as for instance nest maintenance or foraging (Ibid).
More or less automatic task allocation seems also to be at work in human groups:
1) at a global level, regulating the number of individuals in each trade, compensating — with some time lag — for excess or lack of some kinds of professionals.
2) at a local level, for example increasing the presence and activity of some types of individuals in case of a disaster.
Task allocation is possibly a generic property of active networks, related to reciprocal sensing between elements and global fluctuating stability (as in ASHBY's homeostat, or through the action of synaptic weights).