Policy-rich multi-agent support for e-health applications

Modem hospital environments represent complex, distributed, and cross-organisational enterprises with a variety of complex and distributed systems applications. They include a multitude of resources at different places, they have to accommodate real-time requirements, and they have to support rather complicated and, in many cases, unforeseeable business processes. Many processes must strictly follow certain sets of rules, and both process and resource usage have to be dynamically optimized to guarantee the best service to all patients at all times. This paper discusses how state-of-the art agent technology, enriched with expressive policy constraints, can be used to support provision of better quality care for patients and more efficient health service delivery to health professionals. We apply results of our research in multiagent systems and policy modelling to a set of requirements in the e-health domain.