Bonabeau E, Meyer C
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Harv Bus Rev. 2001 May;79(5):106-14, 165.
What do ants and bees have to do with business? A great deal, it turns out. Individually, social insects are only minimally intelligent, and their work together is largely self-organized and unsupervised. Yet collectively they're capable of finding highly efficient solutions to difficult problems and can adapt automatically to changing environments. Over the past 20 years, the authors and other researchers have developed rigorous mathematical models to describe this phenomenon, which has been dubbed "swarm intelligence," and they are now applying them to business. Their research has already helped several companies develop more efficient ways to schedule factory equipment, divide tasks among workers, organize people, and even plot strategy. Emulating the way ants find the shortest path to a new food supply, for example, has led researchers at Hewlett-Packard to develop software programs that can find the most efficient way to route phone traffic over a telecommunications network. South-west Airlines has used a similar model to efficiently route cargo. To allocate labor, honeybees appear to follow one simple but powerful rule--they seem to specialize in a particular activity unless they perceive an important need to perform another function. Using that model, researchers at Northwestern University have devised a system for painting trucks that can automatically adapt to changing conditions. In the future, the authors speculate, a company might structure its entire business using the principles of swarm intelligence. The result, they believe, would be the ultimate self-organizing enterprise--one that could adapt quickly and instinctively to fast-changing markets.
蚂蚁和蜜蜂与商业有什么关系？结果发现，关系很大。单独来看，群居昆虫的智力非常有限，它们的协作很大程度上是自我组织且无人监督的。然而，它们集体能够找到解决难题的高效方案，并能自动适应不断变化的环境。在过去20年里，作者和其他研究人员已经开发出严谨的数学模型来描述这种被称为“群体智能”的现象，并且他们现在正将这些模型应用于商业领域。他们的研究已经帮助几家公司开发出更高效的方法来安排工厂设备、在工人之间分配任务、组织人员，甚至制定战略。例如，模仿蚂蚁找到通往新食物源最短路径的方式，惠普公司的研究人员开发出了能找到在电信网络上路由电话流量最有效方式的软件程序。西南航空公司也使用了类似模型来高效地运输货物。为了分配劳动力，蜜蜂似乎遵循一条简单却强大的规则——它们似乎专门从事某项特定活动，除非它们察觉到执行另一项功能的重要需求。利用这个模型，西北大学的研究人员设计了一种能自动适应变化条件的卡车喷漆系统。作者推测，未来一家公司可能会利用群体智能的原理来构建其整个业务。他们相信，结果将是终极的自我组织企业——一家能够快速且本能地适应快速变化市场的企业。
