Context-aware mobile agents for decision-making support in healthcare emergency applications

This paper applies agents to the highly dynamic and variable context of healthcare emergency decision-support domain. More specifically we advocate the use of mobile agents to support the deployment of an ambulance service in real-time. We presented an implementation of the proposed agent based architecture, which was based on the specific functional and non-functional application requirements set out based on thorough analysis of literature. We also created an illustrative emergency scenario in order to demonstrate the validity and feasibility of our proposed model. From the evaluation of the implementation we were able to identify some of the major technical advantages it has to offer as well as challenges one needs to address in similar attempts. We choose mobile agents as the key enabling technology because they offer a single, general framework in which large-scale distributed real-time decision support applications can be implemented more efficiently. Healthcare was chosen as the target application domain to emphasize both the benefits derived from the exploitation of mobile agent paradigm in this domain as well as to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach in the highly uncertain context.Upprättat; 2005; 20080130 (ysko