Abstract
Coordination of activities among information workers and services, tracking and managing
activities, and intelligent distribution of information are essential to the efficient
operation of any large enterprise. This is particularly important in the healthcare
domain, where many different organizations must cooperate to provide patient care
reliably in a dynamically changing environment. In this review paper we present a
distributed system that supports cooperative problem solving, activity management,
and intelligent delivery of information in dynamic and unreliable environments. The
system consists of a network of task/context managers (TCMs). Each TCM manages a group
of related agents. It maintains up-to-date information on availability, operational
status, and activities of participating agents, and it acts as a mediator between
service requesters and service providers. In addition, the TCM acts as a representative
for its agents with other TCMs, allowing different groups of agents to collaborate
with one another. This paper describes the system architecture, its implementation
and capabilities including matchmaking, plan monitoring, and failure recovery. Our
system has been used in prehospital emergency patient information management applications.
Keywords
Distributed Agents - Medical Workstation - Software Engineering.
