Coordinating Emergency Medical Assistance

Abstract

In this Chapter we propose an organization-based multi-agent application for emergency medical assistance (EMA). The application uses different Agreement Technologies (AT) to provide support to the entire process of out-of-hospital assistance to severe emergency patients and to all involved participants. The system is inspired by the operational model of the Emergency Medical Coordination Centre of the Autonomous Region of Madrid in Spain: SUMMA112. The application is also intended to reduce the average travel times of ambulances to emergency patients by making efficient use of the available resources. Regarding the latter, three different coordination mechanisms are proposed to optimize the allocation of ambulances to patients: one based on trust, an auction-based negotiation model, and auction-based negotiation with trust. We test these mechanisms in different experiments. The results empirically confirm that using AT based mechanisms can reduce the average response times of EMA services.