Simulation of the ambulatory processes in the biggest Brazilian cardiology hospital: a petri net approach

This paper presents a simulation of an ambulatory processes using timed Petri net (TPN). The simulation considers the flow of patients in the biggest Brazilian cardiology hospital. The TPN is used as a decision support system (DSS) to improve the processes, to reduce the waiting time of the patients in the ambulatory and in this way to assure a high-quality service to the patients. Simulations were carried out using the software Visual Object Net++. This is a free software and therefore the presented solution is a low-cost solution. Providing a low-cost solution has a huge importance in this work since the hospital is kept from the government efforts and operates with limited financial resources. The patients’ flow in the hospital can be faced as a service and the modelling and optimization of these services bring more efficiency to the system as well as improve the human factors involved. The results proved that some changes could be made in the processes to improve the performance of the system

Proceedings of the 1st Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (DC-ECAI 2020)

1st Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (DC-ECAI 2020), 29-30 August, 2020 Santiago de Compostela, SpainThe DC-ECAI 2020 provides a unique opportunity for PhD students, who are close to finishing their doctorate research, to interact with experienced researchers in the field. Senior members of the community are assigned as mentors for each group of students based on the student’s research or similarity of research interests. The DC-ECAI 2020, which is held virtually this year, allows students from all over the world to present their research and discuss their ongoing research and career plans with their mentor, to do networking with other participants, and to receive training and mentoring about career planning and career option

Advances in Grid Computing

This book approaches the grid computing with a perspective on the latest achievements in the field, providing an insight into the current research trends and advances, and presenting a large range of innovative research papers. The topics covered in this book include resource and data management, grid architectures and development, and grid-enabled applications. New ideas employing heuristic methods from swarm intelligence or genetic algorithm and quantum encryption are considered in order to explain two main aspects of grid computing: resource management and data management. The book addresses also some aspects of grid computing that regard architecture and development, and includes a diverse range of applications for grid computing, including possible human grid computing system, simulation of the fusion reaction, ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning and complex water systems

A Step Toward Improving Healthcare Information Integration & Decision Support: Ontology, Sustainability and Resilience

The healthcare industry is a complex system with numerous stakeholders, including patients, providers, insurers, and government agencies. To improve healthcare quality and population well-being, there is a growing need to leverage data and IT (Information Technology) to support better decision-making. Healthcare information systems (HIS) are developed to store, process, and disseminate healthcare data. One of the main challenges with HIS is effectively managing the large amounts of data to support decision-making. This requires integrating data from disparate sources, such as electronic health records, clinical trials, and research databases. Ontology is one approach to address this challenge. However, understanding ontology in the healthcare domain is complex and difficult. Another challenge is to use HIS on scheduling and resource allocation in a sustainable and resilient way that meets multiple conflicting objectives. This is especially important in times of crisis when demand for resources may be high, and supply may be limited. This research thesis aims to explore ontology theory and develop a methodology for constructing HIS that can effectively support better decision-making in terms of scheduling and resource allocation while considering system resiliency and social sustainability. The objectives of the thesis are: (1) studying the theory of ontology in healthcare data and developing a deep model for constructing HIS; (2) advancing our understanding of healthcare system resiliency and social sustainability; (3) developing a methodology for scheduling with multi-objectives; and (4) developing a methodology for resource allocation with multi-objectives. The following conclusions can be drawn from the research results: (1) A data model for rich semantics and easy data integration can be created with a clearer definition of the scope and applicability of ontology; (2) A healthcare system's resilience and sustainability can be significantly increased by the suggested design principles; (3) Through careful consideration of both efficiency and patients' experiences and a novel optimization algorithm, a scheduling problem can be made more patient-accessible; (4) A systematic approach to evaluating efficiency, sustainability, and resilience enables the simultaneous optimization of all three criteria at the system design stage, leading to more efficient distributions of resources and locations for healthcare facilities. The contributions of the thesis can be summarized as follows. Scientifically, this thesis work has expanded our knowledge of ontology and data modelling, as well as our comprehension of the healthcare system's resilience and sustainability. Technologically or methodologically, the work has advanced the state of knowledge for system modelling and decision-making. Overall, this thesis examines the characteristics of healthcare systems from a system viewpoint. Three ideas in this thesis—the ontology-based data modelling approach, multi-objective optimization models, and the algorithms for solving the models—can be adapted and used to affect different aspects of disparate systems

Learning Dynamic Priority Scheduling Policies with Graph Attention Networks

The aim of this thesis is to develop novel graph attention network-based models to automatically learn scheduling policies for effectively solving resource optimization problems, covering both deterministic and stochastic environments. The policy learning methods utilize both imitation learning, when expert demonstrations are accessible at low cost, and reinforcement learning, when otherwise reward engineering is feasible. By parameterizing the learner with graph attention networks, the framework is computationally efficient and results in scalable resource optimization schedulers that adapt to various problem structures. This thesis addresses the problem of multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) under temporospatial constraints. Initially, robots with deterministic and homogeneous task performance are considered with the development of the RoboGNN scheduler. Then, I develop ScheduleNet, a novel heterogeneous graph attention network model, to efficiently reason about coordinating teams of heterogeneous robots. Next, I address problems under the more challenging stochastic setting in two parts. Part 1) Scheduling with stochastic and dynamic task completion times. The MRTA problem is extended by introducing human coworkers with dynamic learning curves and stochastic task execution. HybridNet, a hybrid network structure, has been developed that utilizes a heterogeneous graph-based encoder and a recurrent schedule propagator, to carry out fast schedule generation in multi-round settings. Part 2) Scheduling with stochastic and dynamic task arrival and completion times. With an application in failure-predictive plane maintenance, I develop a heterogeneous graph-based policy optimization (HetGPO) approach to enable learning robust scheduling policies in highly stochastic environments. Through extensive experiments, the proposed framework has been shown to outperform prior state-of-the-art algorithms in different applications. My research contributes several key innovations regarding designing graph-based learning algorithms in operations research.Ph.D

Reliable and resilient AI and IoT-based personalised healthcare services: A survey

Recent technological (e.g., IoT, 5G), and economic (e.g., UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals) developments have transformed the healthcare sector towards more personalized and IoT-based healthcare services. These services are realized through control and monitoring applications that are typically developed using artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) based algorithms, that play a significant role to highlight the efficiency of traditional healthcare systems. Current personalized healthcare services are dedicated in a specific environment to support technological personalization (e.g., personalized gadgets/devices). However, they are unable to consider different inter-related health conditions, leading to inappropriate diagnosis and affect sustainability and the long-term health/life of patients. Towards this problem, the state-of-the-art Healthcare 5.0 technology has evolved that supersede previous healthcare technologies. The goal of healthcare 5.0 is to achieve a fully autonomous healthcare service, that takes into account the interdependent effect of different health conditions of a patient. This paper conducts a comprehensive survey on personalized healthcare services. In particular, we first present an overview of key requirements of comprehensive personalized healthcare services (CPHS) in modern healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT), including the definition of personalization and an example use case scenario as a representative for modern HIoT. Second, we explored a fundamental three-layer architecture for IoT-based healthcare systems using both AI and non-AI-based approaches, considering key requirements for CPHS followed by their strengths and weaknesses in the frame of personalized healthcare services. Third, we highlighted different security threats against each layer of IoT architecture along with the possible AI and non-AI-based solutions. Finally, we propose a methodology to develop reliable, resilient, and personalized healthcare services that address the identified weaknesses of existing approaches