Applications of Software Agent Technology in the Health Care Domain

Agent Cities [4] is an ambitious project whose main aim is the construction of a worldwide, publicly accessible network of agent-based FIPA platforms!. In March 2003 there are around 50 active platforms. Each of them supports agents that offer services similar to those that can be found in a real city (facilities, amenities, attractions, information and commercial services). It is expected that, in the near future, it will be possible to implement intelligent complex compound services (e.g. agents that are able to help a user to plan a weekend away, including tasks such as booking air tickets, selecting and booking a room in an appropriate hotel, buying tickets for the theatre and reserving a table in a restaurant that is near the theatre and offers the user's favourite meal). The main aim of our work was to develop a set of agents that could offer to the citizens and visitors of a city not the usual leisure-oriented services but health-care related services. This interest is related with previous work that our research group had done in the last years in the application of AI techniques (especially agent-based technology) to the medical domain (see e.g. [6]). Therefore, we decided to design and implement a multi-agent system with the following features: The user may request information about all the medical centres available in a particular geographical area.