BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

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The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

TASK ALLOCATION 1)4)

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"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).

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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