A Decision Support System for Hospital Emergency Departments Built Using Agent-Based Techniques

This paper presents the results of an ongoing project that is being carried out by the Research Group in Individual Oriented Modelling (IoM) of the University Autonoma of Barcelona (UAB) with the participation of Hospital Emergency Department (ED) Staff Teams. Its general objective is creating a simulator that, used as decision support system (DSS), aids the heads of the ED to make the best informed decisions possible. The defined ED model is a pure Agent-Based Model, formed entirely of the rules governing the behaviour of the individual agents which populate the system. The actions of agents and the communication between them are represented using Moore state machines extended to include probabilistic transitions. The model also includes the environment in which agents move and interact. With the aim of verifying the proposed model an initial simulation has been created using NetLogo.