Provenance in Agent-mediated Healthcare Systems

Agent-oriented cooperation techniques and standardized electronic healthcare record exchange protocols can be used to combine information regarding different facets of a therapy received by a patient from different healthcare providers at different locations. Provenance is an innovative approach to trace events in complex distributed processes, dependencies between such events, and associated decisions by human actors. We focus on three aspects of provenance in agent-mediated healthcare systems: first, we define the provenance concept and show how it can be applied to agent-mediated healthcare applications; second, we investigate and provide a method for independent and autonomous healthcare agents to document the processes they are involved in without directly interacting with each other; and third, we show that this method solves the privacy issues of provenance in agent-mediated healthcare systems.

Technology diffusion: analysing the diffusion of agent technologies

Despite several examples of deployed agent systems, there remain barriers to the large-scale adoption of agent technologies. In order to understand these barriers, this paper considers aspects of marketing theory which deal with diffusion of innovations and their relevance to the agents domain and the current state of diffusion of agent technologies. In particular, the paper examines the role of standards in the adoption of new technologies, describes the agent standards landscape, and compares the development and diffusion of agent technologies with that of object-oriented programming. The paper also reports on a simulation model developed in order to consider different trajectories for the adoption of agent technologies, with trajectories based on various assumptions regarding industry structure and the existence of competing technology standards. We present details of the simulation model and its assumptions, along with the results of the simulation exercises.

Extending Agent Languages for Autonomy

BDI agent languages provide a useful abstraction for complex systems comprised of interactive autonomous entities, but they have been used mostly in the context of single agents with a static plan library of behaviours invoked reactively. These languages provide a theoretically sound basis for agent design but are very limited in providing direct support for autonomy and societal cooperation needed for large scale systems. Some techniques for autonomy and cooperation have been explored in the past in ad hoc implementations, but not incorporated in any agent language. In order to address these shortcomings we extend the well known AgentSpeak(L) BDI agent language to include behaviour generation through planning, declarative goals and motivated goal adoption. We also develop a language-specific multiagent cooperation scheme and, to address potential problems arising from autonomy in a multiagent system, we extend our agents with a mechanism for norm processing leveraging existing theoretical work. These extensions allow for greater autonomy in the resulting systems, enabling them to synthesise new behaviours at runtime and to cooperate in non-scripted patterns.