Multi-Agent Systems for the Application and Employing of E-Health Services

Multi-agent systems are one of the most interesting areas in software research and they have been importantly contributing to the development of the theory and the practice of complex distributed systems (see, e.g., Jennings et al., 1995; Muller, 1998; Bordini et al., 2005) and, in particular, have shown the potential to meet critical needs in high-speed, mission-critical content-rich and distributed information systems where mutual interdependencies, dynamic environments, uncertainty, and sophisticated control play a role (Gasser, 2001). Healthcare applications can take outstanding advantage of the intrinsic characteristics of multi-agent systems because of notable features that most healthcare applications share: (i) they are composed of loosely coupled (complex) systems; (ii) they are realized in terms of heterogeneous components and legacy systems; (iii) they dynamically manage distributed data and resources; and (iv) they are often accessed by remote users in (synchronous) collaboration (Moreno & Nealon, 2003; Annicchiarico et al., 2008). The goal of this chapter is to describe the main reasons why multi-agent systems are considered one of the most interesting technologies for the ABSTRACT