Negotiation-Based Patient Scheduling in Hospitals

Nowadays, hospitals in Germany and other European countries are faced with substantial economic challenges stemming from increased costs and increased demands inter alia resulting from a changing age pyramid. In this respect, patient scheduling is an interesting parameter that determines on the one hand the length of the patients stay in the hospital and the efficiency of the hospital resource allocation on the other hand. Due to the specific characteristics of hospitals such as unexpectedly arriving emergencies or unintended complications during treatments the optimization of patient scheduling is an extraordinary difficult task that cannot be easily solved using a typical centralized optimization algorithm. Thus, in this chapter a decentralized agent based approach is presented that represents patients as well as hospital resources as agents with individual goals that negotiate to find appropriate solutions. The approach has been extensively studied within the MedPAge project and also has been implemented using an agent platform. In this work it will be shown how the traditional message based implementation, which was difficult to construct and even more difficult to maintain, can be replaced with a service based design.