Pheromone-Based Coordination and Control for Task Allocation

A coordination and control approach for task allocation is proposed in this paper, aimed at handling static task allocation and dynamic changes and disturbances. This coordination and control approach uses an indirect coordination mechanism, called pheromone, which comes from the collective behavior of ant colonies for food foraging. This approach has the capacity for task allocation model to automatically find efficient routing paths for processing tasks and reduce communication overhead, which exists in contract net protocol, in shop floor control system. An example confirms that a pheromone-based coordination mechanism has an excellent allocation performance in a static environment, and good adaptability to disturbances in shop floor.