An efficient discrete particle swarm algorithm for Task Assignment Problems

Task assignment problems (TAPs) in distributed computer system are general NP-hard and usually modeled as integer programming discrete problems. Many algorithms are proposed to resolve those problems. Discrete particle swarm algorithm (DPS) is a newly developed method to solve constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) which has advantage on search capacity and can find more solutions. We proposed an improved DPS to solve TAP in this paper. DPS has a special operator namely coefficient multiplying speed, which is designed for CSP but does not exist in other discrete problems. Thus we redefined a coefficient multiplying speed operator with probability selection. We analyzed the speed and position updating formula then we derived a refined position updating formula. Several experiments are carried out to test our DPS. Experimental results show that our algorithm has more efficient search capacity, higher success rate, less running time and more robust.