About
One of the promising domains in which agents can be engaged is hospitalization. In this project a system was proposed with the following agents: an agent which observes patient's heart beat, assistant agent checking the desires of the patient (like the desired temperature in the room),emergency agent alarming the personnel, injection agent, which makes injections according to a diagnose, air conditioning agent which adapts temperature of the room. The project is utilizing the BDI model architecture by using the Jadex framework.
It is now twenty years gone since it was suggested by Bratman to use a belief desire intention model for some specific information technology systems. There where many attempts to use it. However, most of the systems where developed from scratch and every time such a new system was being designed a new one time use only framework of BDI agent has been created. Now having such frameworks as Jadex, one can focus on creating the system and not wasting time on reinventing the wheel. Furthermore, a common framework will allow communities of developers cooperate, exchange knowledge and opinions, etc. All these will lead to a quicker development of more reliable systems using the BDI model.
The author would like to express hope that the observations made in the previous paragraph will allow the hospitalization project to evolve into a stage where the system indeed will be used in medical institutions and serve the common good.
The advantage of using the BDI model rather than traditional agent approaches is quite obvious. Agents in this system are usually associated with some device like a sensor, thus, have a limited belief base. Indeed they do not need to load much information from some external database. They need to be autonomous enough to react within their predefined scope. They have some tasks to perform, which realization depends on some conditions and the goals require some deliberation in order for them to behave appropriately to the given situation.
There are many other advantages, like the fact that agents, being generally speaking more than distributed systems, can properly act even in the case some other agents stop working for some reason and are not directly linked. Of course, there is agent cooperation and in some cases it is required for two agents to work properly in order for this part of the system to work properly. On the other hand most of them may work independently.
The most important advantage of the proposed system is the gain in received by the patient service. Not only may many desires of the patient be realized in an automatic, without delay and adjusted way, but also does the safety increase. This is not only a direct effect of increasing the personnel’s cautiousness and response ability, but also results in an indirect psychological way by giving the patient confidence with regard to his safety and proper treatment.