Archetype based intelligent system for healthcare interoperability

Tese doutoramento - Programa Doutoral em Engenharia BiomédicaThe healthcare arena configures an environment of both complexity and cooperation, in which numerous and distinct information systems must exchange information in a expedite and consolidated manner. Where healthcare interoperability is concerned several techniques, methodologies, architectures and standards exist. However subjects such as service distribution, fault tolerance, standards, communication flavoring and tightly-bound systems still are a major issue of concern. This work studies and researches the best methodologies to imbue intelligent behaviours combined with ontology and moral awareness into multi-agents system applied to healthcare environments. Its core objective is to propose, develop, implement and evaluate an archetype for an interoperability platform oriented towards the healthcare environment. This archetype was validated in several implementation in different major healthcare institutions. It is based in an agent framework named JADE and is adapted and oriented towards the healthcare environment. Henceforth the resulting archetype addresses the existing limitations in past and present solutions regarding healthcare interoperability. It explores the limits of intelligent behaviours in multi-agent systems applied to interoperation procedures in healthcare, towards the improvement of the reliability and quality of information exchanged.A área da saúde configura um ambiente de grande complexidade e cooperação onde inúmeros e distintos sistemas de informação têm que trocar informação entre si de uma forma expedita e consolidada. No âmbito da interoperabilidade hospitalar existem várias técnicas, metodologias, arquiteturas e standards. No entanto, temas como distribuição de serviços, tolerância à falha, standards, flavouring de comunicações e sistemas fortemente acoplados, continuam a ser um importante fonte de preocupação. Este trabalho estuda e pesquiza as melhores metodologias de embeber comportamentos inteligentes combinados com ontologias e noções morais em sistemas multi-agentes aplicados a ambientes hospitalares. O seu objectivo principal é propor, desenvolver, implementar e avaliar um arquétipo para uma plataforma de interoperabilidade orientada para o ambiente hospitalar. Este arquétipo foi validado em diferentes implementações em instituições de saúde portuguesas de grande dimensão. Esta plataforma é baseada numa framework de agentes denominada JADE e foi adaptada e orientada para o ambiente hospitalar.. Desta forma o arquétipo resultante é orientado para resolver as limitações existentes nas soluções atuais de interoperabilidade hospitalar. Este explora os limites dos comportamentos inteligentes em sistemas multi-agente quando aplicados em procedimentos de interoperabilidade na área da saúde para melhorar a fiabilidade e qualidade da informação trocada entre estes sistemas

An agent-based architecture for software tool coordination

This paper presents a practical multi-agent architecture for assisting users to coordinate the use of both special and general purpose software tools for performing tasks in a given problem domain. The architecture is open and extensible being based on the techniques of agent-based software interoperability (ABSI), where each tool is encapsulated by a KQML-speaking agent. The work reported here adds additional facilities for the user to describe the problem domain, the tasks that are commonly performed in that domain and the ways in which various software tools are commonly used by the user. Together, these features provide the computer with a degree of autonomy in the user's problem domain in order to help the user achieve tasks through the coordinated use of disparate software tools. This research focuses on the representational and planning capabilities required to extend the existing benefits of the ABSI architecture to include domain-level problem-solving skills. In particular, the paper proposes a number of standard ontologies that are required for this type of problem, and discusses a number of issues related to planning the coordinated use of agent-encapsulated tools.Unpublished[1] N. Singh. A Common Lisp API and facilitator for ABSI: version 2.0.3. Technical Report Logic-93-4, Logic Group, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, 1993. [2] M. R. Genesereth and S. P. Ketchpel. Software agents. Communications of the ACM, 37(7):48–53, July 1994. [3] M. R. Cutkosky, R. S. Engelmore, R. E. Fikes, M. R. Genesereth, and T. R. Gruber. PACT: An experiment in integrating engineering systems. Computer, 26(1):28–37, 1993. [4] T. Khedro and M. Genesereth. The federation architecture for interoperable agent-based concurrent engineering systems. International Journal on Concurrent Engineering, Research and Applications, 2:125–131, 1994. [5] W. Wong and A. Keller. Developing an Internet presence with online electronic catalogs. Stanford Center for Information Technology, http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/keller/1994/cnet-online-cat.ps. [6] T. Nishida and H. Takeda. Towards the knowledgeable community. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Building and Sharing of Very Large Scale Knowledge Bases, pages 157–166, 1993. http://ai-www.aist-nara.ac.jp/doc/people/takeda/doc/ps/kbks.ps. [7] S. J. S. Cranefield and M. K. Purvis. Agent-based integration of general-purpose tools. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents, Fourth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, December 1995. http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~cikm/iia/proc.html. [8] Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory. Ontology Server Web page. http://www-ksl-svc.stanford.edu:5915/. [9] K. Erol, J. Hendler, and D. S. Nau. UMCP: A sound and complete procedure for hierarchical task-network planning. In K. Hammond, editor, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on AI Planning Systems, pages 249–254, 1994. [10] P. R. Cohen, A. Cheyer, M. Wang, and S. C. Baeg. An open agent architecture. In Proceedings of the Spring Symposium on Software Agents, Technical Report SS-94-03. AAAI Press, 1994. ftp://ftp.ai.sri.com/pub/papers/cheyer-aaai94.ps.gz. [11] C. A. Knoblock and J. L. Ambite. Agents for information gathering. In J. Bradshaw, editor, Software Agents. AAAI/MIT Press, 1996. forthcoming. Also http://www.isi.edu/sims/papers/95-agents-book.ps. [12] O. Etzioni, N. Lesh, and R. Segal. Building softbots for UNIX. Unpublished technical report, 1992. ftp://june.cs.washington.edu/pub/etzioni/softbots/softbots-tr.ps.Z. [13] S. S. Ali and S. Haller. Interpreting spreadsheet data for human-agent interactions. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents, Fourth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, December 1995. http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~cikm/iia/proc.html

Planning and matchmaking in a multi-agent system for software integration

Computer users employ a collection of software tools to support their day-to-day work. Often the software environment is dynamic with new tools being added as they become available and removed as they become obsolete or outdated. In today’s systems, the burden of coordinating the use of these disparate tools, remembering the correct sequence of commands, and incorporating new and modified programs into the daily work pattern lies with the user. This paper describes a multi-agent system, DALEKS, that assists users in utilizing diverse software tools for their everyday work. It manages work and information flow by providing a coordination layer that selects the appropriate tool(s) to use for each of the user’s tasks and automates the flow of information between them. This enables the user to be concerned more with what has to be done, rather than with the specifics of how to access tools and information. Here we describe the system architecture of DALEKS and illustrate it with an example in university course administration.Unpublished[Cranefield and Purvis, 1995] S. J. S. Cranefield and M. K. Purvis. Agent-based integration of general-purpose tools. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents, Fourth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 1995. Also in http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~cikm/iia/proc.html. [Cranefield and Purvis, 1997] S. J. S. Cranefield and M. K. Purvis. An agent-based architecture for software tool coordination. In L. Cavedon, A.S. Rao, and W. Wobcke, editors, Intelligent Agent Systems: Theoretical and Practical Issues, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, number 1209, pages 44-58. Springer, 1997. [Cranefield et al., 1997] S. J. Cranefield, A. C. Diaz and M. K. Purvis. Planning and matchmaking for the interoperation of information processing agents. Discussion Paper 97/1, Department of Information Science, University of Otago, 1997. Submitted to the European Conference on Planning 1997. [Erol et al., 1994] K. Erol, J.Hendler, and D.S. Nau. UMCP: A sound and complete procedure for hierarchical task-network planning. In K. Hammond, editor, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on AI Planning Systems, pages 249-254, 1994. [Genesereth et al., 1995] M.R. Genesereth, N.P. Singh, and M.A.Syed. A distributed and anonymous knowledge sharing approach to software interoperation. Int. Journal of Cooperative Information Systems,4(4):339-367, 1995. [Kuokka and Harada, 1995] D. Kuokka and L. Harada. Matchmaking for information agents. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 1, pages 672-678, 1995. [LAN-ACL, 1995] Uniform Resource Characteristics Web page, Advanced Computing Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory. http://www.acl.lanl.gov/URC/, November 1995

Planning and matchmaking for the interoperation of information processing agents

In today's open, distributed environments, there is an increasing need for systems to assist the interoperation of tools and information resources. This paper describes a multi-agent system, DALEKS, that supports such activities for the information processing domain. With this system, information processing tasks are accomplished by the use of an agent architecture incorporating task planning and information agent matchmaking components. We discuss the characteristics of planning in this domain and describe how information processing tools are specified for the planner. We also describe the manner in which planning, agent matchmaking, and information task execution are interleaved in the DALEKS system. An example application taken from the domain of university course administration is provided to illustrate some of the activities performed in this system.Unpublished[Ambros-Ingerson and Steel, 1988] J. Ambros-Ingerson and S. Steel. Integrating planning, execution and monitoring. In Proceedings of the 7th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-88), pages 735–740, 1988. [Cranefield and Purvis, 1995] S. J. S. Cranefield and M. K. Purvis. Agent-based integration of general-purpose tools. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents, Fourth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, December 1995. [Cranefield and Purvis, 1996] S. J. S. Cranefield and M. K. Purvis. An agent-based architecture for software tool coordination. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Theoretical and Practical Foundations of Intelligent Agents, Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1996. (to appear in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intellence, Springer, 1997). [Erol et al., 1994] K. Erol, J. Hendler, and D. S. Nau. UMCP: A sound and complete procedure for hierarchical task-network planning. In K. Hammond, editor, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on AI Planning Systems, pages 249–254, 1994. [Genesereth and Ketchpel, 1994] M. R. Genesereth and S. P. Ketchpel. Software agents. Communications of the ACM, 37(7):48–53, July 1994. [Golden et al., 1994] K. Golden, O. Etzioni, and D. Weld. Omnipotence without omniscience: Efficient sensor management for planning. In Proceedings of the 12th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), pages 1048–1054, 1994. [Knoblock, 1995] C. A. Knoblock. Planning, executing, sensing, and replanning for information gathering. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 2, pages 1686–1693, 1995. [Kuokka and Harada, 1995] D. Kuokka and L. Harada. Matchmaking for information agents. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 1, pages 672–678, 1995. [Kwok and Weld, 1996] C. Kwok and D. Weld. Planning to gather information. In Proceedings of the 13th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96), 1996. [LANL-ACL, 1995] Uniform Resource Characteristics Web page, Advanced Computing Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory. http://www.acl.lanl.gov/URC/, November 1995. [Williamson et al., 1996] M. Williamson, K. Decker, and K. Sycara. Unified information and control flow in hierarchical task networks. In Proceedings of the AAAI-96 Workshop on Theories of Planning, Action, and Control, 1996

Planning and matchmaking for the interoperation of information processing agents

In today's open, distributed environments, there is an increasing need for systems to assist the interoperation of tools and information resources. This paper describes a multi-agent system, DALEKS, that supports such activities for the information processing domain. With this system, information processing tasks are accomplished by the use of an agent architecture incorporating task planning and information agent matchmaking components. We discuss the characteristics of planning in this domain and describe how information processing tools are specified for the planner. We also describe the manner in which planning, agent matchmaking, and information task execution are interleaved in the DALEKS system. An example application taken from the domain of university course administration is provided to illustrate some of the activities performed in this system.Unpublished[Ambros-Ingerson and Steel, 1988] J. Ambros-Ingerson and S. Steel. Integrating planning, execution and monitoring. In Proceedings of the 7th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-88), pages 735–740, 1988. [Cranefield and Purvis, 1995] S. J. S. Cranefield and M. K. Purvis. Agent-based integration of general-purpose tools. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents, Fourth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, December 1995. [Cranefield and Purvis, 1996] S. J. S. Cranefield and M. K. Purvis. An agent-based architecture for software tool coordination. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Theoretical and Practical Foundations of Intelligent Agents, Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1996. (to appear in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intellence, Springer, 1997). [Erol et al., 1994] K. Erol, J. Hendler, and D. S. Nau. UMCP: A sound and complete procedure for hierarchical task-network planning. In K. Hammond, editor, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on AI Planning Systems, pages 249–254, 1994. [Genesereth and Ketchpel, 1994] M. R. Genesereth and S. P. Ketchpel. Software agents. Communications of the ACM, 37(7):48–53, July 1994. [Golden et al., 1994] K. Golden, O. Etzioni, and D. Weld. Omnipotence without omniscience: Efficient sensor management for planning. In Proceedings of the 12th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), pages 1048–1054, 1994. [Knoblock, 1995] C. A. Knoblock. Planning, executing, sensing, and replanning for information gathering. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 2, pages 1686–1693, 1995. [Kuokka and Harada, 1995] D. Kuokka and L. Harada. Matchmaking for information agents. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 1, pages 672–678, 1995. [Kwok and Weld, 1996] C. Kwok and D. Weld. Planning to gather information. In Proceedings of the 13th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96), 1996. [LANL-ACL, 1995] Uniform Resource Characteristics Web page, Advanced Computing Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory. http://www.acl.lanl.gov/URC/, November 1995. [Williamson et al., 1996] M. Williamson, K. Decker, and K. Sycara. Unified information and control flow in hierarchical task networks. In Proceedings of the AAAI-96 Workshop on Theories of Planning, Action, and Control, 1996

Integrating environmental information: Incorporating metadata in a distributed information systems architecture

An approach is presented for incorporating metatata constraints into queries to be processed by a distributed environmental information system. The approach, based on a novel metamodel unifying concepts from the Unified Modelling Language (UML), the Object Query Language (OQL), and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), allows metadata information to be represented and processed in combination with regular data queries.Unpublished[ANZLIC, 1999] ANZLIC Metadata Working Group home page, http://www.anzlic.org.au/metagrp.htm, 1999. [Cattell et al., 1997] R.G.G. Cattell, D. Barry, D. Bartels, M. Berler, J. Eastman, S. Gamerman, D. Jordan, A. Springer, H. Strickland, and D. Wade, editors. The Object Database Standard: ODMG 2.0. Morgan Kaufmann, 1997. [Cranefield et al., 1995] Cranefield, S. J. S., Gorman, P., and Purvis, M. K., "Communicating Agents: An Emerging Approach for Distributed Heterogeneous Systems", New Zealand Journal of Computing, 6:1B (1995) 337-343. [Cranefield & Purvis, 1997] Cranefield, S. and Purvis, M., “An agent-based architecture for software tool coordination”, Intelligent Agent Systems: Theoretical and Practical Issues, L. Cavedon, A. Rao, W. Wobcke (eds.), Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1209,(1997) 44-58. [DESIRE, 1999] DESIRE: Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education, http://www.lub.lu.se/desire/, 1999. [Dublin, 2000] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative home page, http://purl.org/dc/, 2000. [FIPA, 1998] FIPA 98 Specification Documents, http://www.fipa.org/spec/fipa98.html, 1999. [Gateway, 2000] The Gateway to Educational Materials home page, http://www.geminfo.org/, 2000. [Genesereth & Ketchpel, 1994] Genesereth, M. R. and Ketchpel, S. P. “Software Agents Software agents. Communications of the ACM, 37(7):48–53, July 1994. [GILS, 1999] Global Information Locator Service home page, http://www.gils.net/locator.html, 1999. [GSDI, 1999] Global Spatial Data Infrastructure home page, http://www.gsdi.org/, 1999. [ISO/TC, 2000] ISO/TC 46 Subcommittee on presentation, identification and description of documents home page, http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/iso/tc46sc9/index.htm, 2000. [LBLNL EPA, 1998] LBNL EPA Scientific Metadata Standards Project home page, http://pueblo.lbl.gov/~olken/epa.html, 1998. [MDC, 1999] Meta Data Coalition home page, http://www.mdcinfo.com/, 1999. [Purvis et al., 2000a] Purvis, M., Cranefield, S., and Nowostawski, M., “A Distributed Architecture for Environmental Information Systems” to appear in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems, IFIP Series, Kluwer Academic (2000). [Purvis et al. 2000b] Purvis, M., Cranefield. S., Bush, G., Carter, D., McKinlay, B., Nowostawski, M., and Ward, R., “The NZDIS Project: an Agent-based Distributed Information Systems Architecture”, Proceedings of the Hawai`i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS- 33), R. H. Sprague, Jr. (ed.), (CD ROM) IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA (2000). [RDF 2000] Resource Description Framework, W3C Technology and Society Domain, http://www.w3.org/RDF/, 2000/. [Tomasic et al., 1998] Tomasic, A., Raschid, L., and Valduriez, P., “Scaling Access to Heterogeneous Data Sources with DISCO”, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 10(1), January 1998. [URI 2000] Uniform Resource Identifiers Working Group, Internet Engineering Task Force, http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/, 2000. [W3C, 1997] “Date and Time Formats”, W3C Technical Report, http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE- datetime.html, 1997. [W3C, 1999] W3C Technology and Society Domain, Metadata Activity Statement, http://www.w3.org/Metadata/Activity.html, 1999

Integrating environmental information: Incorporating metadata in a distributed information systems architecture

An approach is presented for incorporating metatata constraints into queries to be processed by a distributed environmental information system. The approach, based on a novel metamodel unifying concepts from the Unified Modelling Language (UML), the Object Query Language (OQL), and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), allows metadata information to be represented and processed in combination with regular data queries.Unpublished[ANZLIC, 1999] ANZLIC Metadata Working Group home page, http://www.anzlic.org.au/metagrp.htm, 1999. [Cattell et al., 1997] R.G.G. Cattell, D. Barry, D. Bartels, M. Berler, J. Eastman, S. Gamerman, D. Jordan, A. Springer, H. Strickland, and D. Wade, editors. The Object Database Standard: ODMG 2.0. Morgan Kaufmann, 1997. [Cranefield et al., 1995] Cranefield, S. J. S., Gorman, P., and Purvis, M. K., "Communicating Agents: An Emerging Approach for Distributed Heterogeneous Systems", New Zealand Journal of Computing, 6:1B (1995) 337-343. [Cranefield & Purvis, 1997] Cranefield, S. and Purvis, M., “An agent-based architecture for software tool coordination”, Intelligent Agent Systems: Theoretical and Practical Issues, L. Cavedon, A. Rao, W. Wobcke (eds.), Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1209,(1997) 44-58. [DESIRE, 1999] DESIRE: Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education, http://www.lub.lu.se/desire/, 1999. [Dublin, 2000] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative home page, http://purl.org/dc/, 2000. [FIPA, 1998] FIPA 98 Specification Documents, http://www.fipa.org/spec/fipa98.html, 1999. [Gateway, 2000] The Gateway to Educational Materials home page, http://www.geminfo.org/, 2000. [Genesereth & Ketchpel, 1994] Genesereth, M. R. and Ketchpel, S. P. “Software Agents Software agents. Communications of the ACM, 37(7):48–53, July 1994. [GILS, 1999] Global Information Locator Service home page, http://www.gils.net/locator.html, 1999. [GSDI, 1999] Global Spatial Data Infrastructure home page, http://www.gsdi.org/, 1999. [ISO/TC, 2000] ISO/TC 46 Subcommittee on presentation, identification and description of documents home page, http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/iso/tc46sc9/index.htm, 2000. [LBLNL EPA, 1998] LBNL EPA Scientific Metadata Standards Project home page, http://pueblo.lbl.gov/~olken/epa.html, 1998. [MDC, 1999] Meta Data Coalition home page, http://www.mdcinfo.com/, 1999. [Purvis et al., 2000a] Purvis, M., Cranefield, S., and Nowostawski, M., “A Distributed Architecture for Environmental Information Systems” to appear in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems, IFIP Series, Kluwer Academic (2000). [Purvis et al. 2000b] Purvis, M., Cranefield. S., Bush, G., Carter, D., McKinlay, B., Nowostawski, M., and Ward, R., “The NZDIS Project: an Agent-based Distributed Information Systems Architecture”, Proceedings of the Hawai`i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS- 33), R. H. Sprague, Jr. (ed.), (CD ROM) IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA (2000). [RDF 2000] Resource Description Framework, W3C Technology and Society Domain, http://www.w3.org/RDF/, 2000/. [Tomasic et al., 1998] Tomasic, A., Raschid, L., and Valduriez, P., “Scaling Access to Heterogeneous Data Sources with DISCO”, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 10(1), January 1998. [URI 2000] Uniform Resource Identifiers Working Group, Internet Engineering Task Force, http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/, 2000. [W3C, 1997] “Date and Time Formats”, W3C Technical Report, http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE- datetime.html, 1997. [W3C, 1999] W3C Technology and Society Domain, Metadata Activity Statement, http://www.w3.org/Metadata/Activity.html, 1999