Exploiting social reasoning of open multi-agent systems to enhance cooperation in hospitals

Abstract

The Virtual Hospital Patient Scheduling System (VHPSS) focuses on building multi-agent cooperative systems. We have chosen to build Intelligent agents that perform coordination tasks for the users, i.e. the medical staff. An agent in VHPSS system has a limited information. To solve some problems, the agent has to cooperate with the other agents of the surrounding environment. This article presents this scheduling system based on our principal contributions in research on multi-agent systems. (1) At the architectural level, the system is based on a multi-agent software agent architecture which has several advantages: parallelization of agent’s tasks, reusability of agent’s components, partial mobility and partial cloning of agent’s code. (2) At the cooperative level, the system uses a new agent negotiation protocol making it possible to accelerate the process of task allocation.