Inproceedings,
Dynamic Patient Scheduling in Hospitals
Agent Technology in Business Applications (ATEBA04) Multi-Conference on Business Information Systems (MKWI2004), Essen, Germany, (9--11 March 2004)
Abstract
In this paper, we focus on treatment scheduling for patients in hospitals.
Scheduling and coordinating patients in hospitals is faced with a high amount of complexity
due to the inherent dynamics of the processes and the distributed organisational
structure of hospitals. To this end, our multi-agent system MedPAge (Medical
Path Agents) is presented, in which patients and hospital resources are represented
as autonomous agents. For coordination, our market mechanism MedPaCo (Medical
Path Coordination) is described, in which the patient agents negotiate with each other
- based upon individual health state dependent cost functions - over the scarce hospital
resources. To incorporate stochastic processing times, a decision theoretic approach is
introduced in which delays are viewed as risk by the patient agents. Further, a first approach
to handle variable pathways is given. Finally, we describe a hospital simulation
system which allows the benchmark of different coordination mechanisms including
the current practice in hospitals.
