Querying Social Practices in Hospital Context

Understanding the social contexts in which actions and interactions take place is of utmost importance for planning one’s goals and activities. People use social practices as means to make sense of their environment, assessing how that context relates to past, common experiences, culture and capabilities. Social practices can therefore simplify deliberation and planning in complex contexts. In the context of patient-centered planning, hospitals seek means to ensure that patients and their families are at the center of decisions and planning of the healthcare processes. This requires on one hand that patients are aware of the practices being in place at the hospital and on the other hand that hospitals have the means to evaluate and adapt current practices to the needs of the patients. In this paper we apply a framework for formalizing social practices of an organization to an emergency department that carries out patient-centered planning. We indicate how such a formalization can be used to answer operational queries about the expected outcome of operational actions.</p

Engineering Multi-Agent Systems: State of Affairs and the Road Ahead

The continuous integration of software-intensive systems together with the ever-increasing computing power offer a breeding ground for intelligent agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) more than ever before. Over the past two decades, a wide variety of languages, models, techniques and methodologies have been proposed to engineer agents and MAS. Despite this substantial body of knowledge and expertise, the systematic engineering of large-scale and open MAS still poses many challenges. Researchers and engineers still face fundamental questions regarding theories, architectures, languages, processes, and platforms for designing, implementing, running, maintaining, and evolving MAS. This paper reports on the results of the 6th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2018, 14th-15th of July, 2018, Stockholm, Sweden), where participants discussed the issues above focusing on the state of affairs and the road ahead for researchers and engineers in this area