A Distributed Hospital Resource Scheduling System using a Multi-Agent Framework
Umesh Ashok Deshpande, Arobinda Gupta, Anupam Basu · IETE Technical Review · 2001
Multi-agent systems are increasingly finding applications in several practical domains. We recognize that modern health care systems can be meaningfully enabled if the technology is used. We note that in a realistic scenario, it is often the case that any single hospital may not have all the required resources or capabilities. Different hospitals need to interact with one another to share inter-hospital resources for providing better service to the patients. In this paper a multi-agent based solution to the hospital scheduling problem using the Generalized Partial Global Planning (GPGP) approach proposed by Decker and Li [1] is presented first. We then propose a new coordination mechanism for the resource sharing across hospitals. In our approach, we also address the time criticality of patient care.We also present the Design-to-Time local scheduler used in [1] and identify the problems with that. We then suggest some modifications to the scheduler that are applicable in the present context. The modifications proposed reduce the overall complexity of the scheduler and make it scalable.