Agent based optimization and management of healthcare processes at the emergency department

n this paper, a Multi Agent System (MAS) is presented, aiming to minimize the waiting time of patient as well as the cost of care within emergency department. In such organization, a persistent need of efficiently activity scheduling process arises in order to take care of all arrival patients at the emergency department and to improve the quality of care. Software agents were adopted to provide the means to accomplish such real-time application, due to their autonomous, reactive and/or proactive nature, and their effectiveness in dynamic environments by incorporating coordination strategies. Specifically, the objective of the MAS is being able to represent the real conditions, courses, and the human decision behavior. The main aim of this paper is to present the overall design of the proposed MAS, emphasizing its architecture and the behavior of each agent of the model, as well as on the scheduling model which provide the activity scheduling process of care and the agent interaction protocol to ensure cooperation between agents that perform coordination tasks for the users, i.e. the medical staff needed to sol ve some problems at the emergency department.