“…While this interdisciplinary interaction between engineering, particularly computer science and robotics, and biology is now commonplace (Di Caro and Dorigo 1998;Foukia et al 2003;Di Caro et al 2004, January;Gerkey and Matarić 2004;Mullen et al 2009;Rubenstein et al 2014), it is to our knowledge still rare for the science of organizations or management and biology, and in many of the existing cases, production processes, not the human workers themselves, are modeled as the equivalent to the 'workers' discussed here (Fulkerson and Staffend 1997;Cicirello and Smith 2004;Frayret et al 2004). Perhaps this is in part due to the difficulty of translating research findings from biology to the social sciences and vice versa (though see: Pugh et al 1969;Levchuk et al 2002;Helbing and Balietti 2011), or perhaps due to the fact that in designing optimal strategies for human organizations, the selfish motives of individuals play an overshadowing role (Itoh 1992; note that "selfish" is used here not in a moral sense, but purely in the sense that individual payoffs, as well as group-level performance, have to be optimized in human organizations, unlike in social insect organizational strategies). However, such questions as what is the ideal ratio of specialists to generalists, how does fluctuation in demand for different jobs affect the optimal level of specialization, and may there be benefits in terms of efficiency, flexibility, or robustness to having 'surplus' workers, are universal across many social and engineered complex systems.…”