Gossip based asynchronous and randomized distributed task assignment with guaranteed performance on heterogeneous networks

The main contribution of this paper is a novel distributed algorithm based on asynchronous and randomized local interactions, i.e., gossip based, for task assignment on heterogeneous networks. We consider a set of tasks with heterogeneous cost to be assigned to a set of nodes with heterogeneous execution speed and interconnected by a network with unknown topology represented by an undirected graph. Our objective is to minimize the execution time of the set of tasks by the networked system. We propose a local interaction rule which allows the nodes of a network to cooperatively assign tasks among themselves with a guaranteed performance with respect to the optimal assignment exploiting a gossip based randomized interaction scheme. We first characterize the convergence properties of the proposed approach, then we propose an edge selection process and a distributed embedded stop criterion to terminate communications, not only task exchanges, while keeping the performance guarantee. Numerical simulations are finally presented to corroborate the theoretical results.