Negotiation-Based Patient Scheduling in Hospitals - Reengineering Message-Based Interactions with Services

Nowadays, hospitals in Germany and other European countries are faced with substantial economic challenges stemming from increased costs and increased demands inter alia resulting from a changing age pyramid. In this respect, patient scheduling is an interesting parameter that determines on the one hand the length of the patients stay in the hospital and the e ciency of the hospital resource allocation on the other hand. Due to the speci c characteristics of hospitals such as unexpectedly arriving emergencies or unintended complications during treatments the optimization of patient scheduling is an extraordinary di cult task that cannot be easily solved using a typical centralized optimization algorithm. Thus, in this paper a decentralized agent based approach is presented that represents patients as well as hospital resources as agents with individual goals that negotiate to nd appropriate solutions. The approach has been extensively studied within the MedPAge project and also has been implemented using an agent platform. In this work it will be shown how the traditional message based implementation, which was di cult to construct and even more di cult to maintain, can be replaced with a service based design.