Multi-agent systems are one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. In the last ten years there has been agrowing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care, and it has been argued that the properties of agents fit very well with the usual chracteristi…
Multi-agent systems are one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. In the last ten years there has been agrowing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care, and it has been argued that the properties of agents fit very well with the usual chracteristics of the problems found in health care.
The first specialised workshop on this area was held at Autonomous Agents '2000; several other workshops have followed since then, including three ECAI workshops in 2002, 2004 and 2006. Moreover, a growing European community of researchers interested in the application of intelligent agents in health care emerged as a result of the activities within the AgentCities European project and the AgentLink III Technical Forum Group on Healthcare Applications of Intelligent Agents.
The field is now starting to have some academic maturity, and it may now be a good time for the specialists in the field to meet and report on the results achieved in this area, to discuss the benefits (and drawbacks) that agent-based systems may bring to medical domains, and also to provide a list of the research topics that should be tackled in the near future to make the deployment of health-care agent-based systems a reality.
