Implementation of a publication-subscription environment within a multi-agents paradigm

Information management and workflow are one of the most important challenges to be met in hospitals. This challenge is even more important when having to deal with getting the right information at the right place, including such tools as alerts and notification. Open distributed intelligent agents constitute one of the most promising ways to explore, providing both ability to work in heterogeneous environment, and dealing with highly structured semantic knowledge. The paradigm proposed in this work is to consider a publication/subscription system as collaborative procedures network organized in workflows modelled by Petri nets. Each stage of workflow is carried out by a set of agent units having placed their competences in a workspace with a semantic description. Finally, robustness and tolerance are implicit properties of such agents; two mandatory characteristics of healthcare information systems.