Bucket Brigade

From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_brigade

A Bucket brigade is a method for transporting items where items are passed from one stationary person to the next. More specifically, it refers to a method of firefighting before the advent of hand pumped fire engines, whereby firefighters would pass buckets to each other to extinguish a blaze. A famous example of this is the Union Fire Company.

The method is applicable only if the number of participants is sufficient compared to the distance to cross. This principle inspired various technical items, e.g. the bucket-brigade device.

The term "bucket brigade" is also used for a certain method of organizing manual order picking in distribution centers. Here customer orders to be processed are passed from one order picker to the next. When the last picker in line has finished picking an order he walks back and takes over the work of the next-to-last picker, who in his turn also walks back and so on, until the first man in line is reached, who then commences picking an entirely a new order.

Similar applications of the idea of bucket brigades also exist for production lines.

From "Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business", Harvard Business Review May 2001

Like runners transferring a baton in a relay race, the ants pass food down a chain. But the ants are not stationay, and their transfer points are not fixed: an ant carries the food down the chain until it reaches the next ant, and after transferring the food, it turns back until it meets the previous ant in the chain to receive its next load. The only fixed location in this operation are the start (the food source) and the end (the nest).