Effective reformulations for task allocation in distributed systems with a large number of communicating tasks

In any distributed processing environment, decisions need to be made concerning the assignment of computational task modules to various processors. Many versions of the task allocation problem have appeared in the literature. Intertask communication makes the assignment decision difficult; capacity limitations at the processors increase the difficulty. This problem is naturally formulated as a nonlinear integer program, but can be linearized to take advantage of commercial integer programming solvers. While traditional approaches to linearizing the problem perform well when only a few tasks communicate, they have considerable difficulty solving problems involving a large number of intercommunicating tasks. This paper introduces new mixed integer formulations for three variations of the task allocation problem. Results from extensive computational tests conducted over real and generated data indicate that the reformulations are particularly efficient when a large number of tasks communicate, solving reasonably large problems faster than other exact approaches available. Index Terms--Task allocation, nonlinear optimization, integer programming.