Some simple task assignment problems for distributed networked agents

This paper formulates, in the abstract, a problem of assigning subtasks to distributed agents (processors) so that they can perform a certain global task efficiently. We model the group of networked agents by a graph that describes its communication capabilities, which is referred to as the organizational graph. In addition, we assume that the desired task-performing activity defines another graph describing the required communication. We then formulate a few variants of the problem with potentially conflicting objectives (or constraints) of load balancing and communication costs. For some of these variants, we provide algorithms that solve the assignment problem, while some others are left open