针对制造系统中的任务分配问题,提出了一种基于信息素的协调方法并搭建了原型实验仿真平台。该协调方法源于蚁群的觅食行为活动,蚂蚁在觅食的路径上会留下一种特殊的化学物质(信息素),利用该介质,可以更好地在群体内部实现协调与合作。基于信息素的协调方法可以自动寻找到有效的加工单元来处理所需要加工任务,有效地克服以往存在于基于合同网协调机制中的通信信息量大等不足。实验结果证明了基于信息素的协调机制对任务分配具有极其稳定的优化能力。
A pheromone-based coordination approach and a prototype implementation for task allocation are pro- posed, for dealing with the static task allocation. The approach uses an indirect coordination mechanism, called pheromone, which comes from the collective behavior of ant colonies for food foraging. Therefore it can automat- ically find efficient manufacturing cells for processing tasks and reduce communication overhead, which exists in the contract net protocol. Experimental results confirm that the approach has excellent stability and optimization ability for task allocation problems in a static environment.