Coordinating Mutually Exclusive Resources using GPGP

  • Authors:

  • Keith Decker;Jinjiang Li

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware decker@cis.udel.edu;Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware

  • Venue:
  • Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Hospital Patient Scheduling is an inherently distributed problem because of the way real hospitals are organized. As medical procedures have become more complex, and their associated tests and treatments have become interrelated, the current ad hoc patient scheduling solutions have been observed to break down. We propose a multi-agent solution using the Generalized Partial Global Planning (GPGP) approach that preserves the existing human organization and authority structures, while providing better system-level performance (increased hospital unit throughput and decreased patient stay time). To do this, we extend GPGP with a new coordination mechanism to handle mutually exclusive resource relationships. Like the other GPGP mechanisms, the new mechanism can be applied to any problem with the appropriate resource relationship. We evaluate this new mechanism in the context of the hospital patient scheduling problem, and examine the effect of increasing interrelations between tasks performed by different hospital units.