AN AGENT-BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR HOSPITAL EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS

Manel Taboada, Eduardo Cabrera, Emilio Luque

2011

Abstract

Healthcare operational management provides many areas where modelling and simulation have been shown to be useful tools, and within this field there is probably no area more fluid or dynamic than hospital emergency departments (ED). This paper presents the results of an ongoing project that is being carried out by Individual Oriented Modelling (IoM) research group of the UAB, with the participation of Hospital ED Staff Teams. The general objective is creating a simulator that, used as decision support system (DSS), aids the heads of the ED to answer both, “what if...” questions in order to make the best informed decisions possible, and more complex questions involving the optimisation of the system. The defined ED model is a pure Agent-Based Model, formed entirely of the rules governing the behaviour of the individual agents which populate the system. Two distinct types of agents have been identified, active and passive. Active agents represent human actors, meanwhile passive agents represent services and other reactive systems. Active agents are described by Moore state machines extended to include probabilistic transitions. With the aim of verifying the proposed model a simulation has been created using NetLogo.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Taboada M., Cabrera E. and Luque E. (2011). AN AGENT-BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR HOSPITAL EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2011) ISBN 978-989-8425-34-8, pages 417-422. DOI: 10.5220/0003291804170422

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf11,
author={Manel Taboada and Eduardo Cabrera and Emilio Luque},
title={AN AGENT-BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR HOSPITAL EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2011)},
year={2011},
pages={417-422},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003291804170422},
isbn={978-989-8425-34-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2011)
TI - AN AGENT-BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR HOSPITAL EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS
SN - 978-989-8425-34-8
AU - Taboada M.
AU - Cabrera E.
AU - Luque E.
PY - 2011
SP - 417
EP - 422
DO - 10.5220/0003291804170422