Title: Healthcare decision support tool: multi-agent system for bed management

Authors: Nesrine Zoghlami; Besma Glaa; Souad Rabah; Mourad Abed

Addresses: LTSIRS Laboratory, Tunis EL Manar University, ENIT, 1002 Tunis, Tunisia ' Department of Management and Engineering (IEI), Business Administration (FEK), Linköping University, Sweden ' LTSIRS Laboratory, Tunis EL Manar University, MIS Laboratory, ESIEE-Amiens, UPJV University, France ' Laboratoire d'Automatique, de Mécanique, d'Informatique, Industrielles et Humaines (LAMIH), UMR CNRS 8201, University of Valenciennes, F59313 Cedex 9, France

Abstract: The effective management of the allocation of limited resources such as beds is a key to the delivery of timely, high quality and low cost healthcare. However, an efficient utilisation of beds is not easy to accomplish because of the complexity of the healthcare system and the higher amount of problems that the hospitals are facing such as the overcrowding. Moreover, in order to solve these problems, effective bed management remains one of the prominent solutions for the majority of hospitals. In this paper, a decision support system based on multi-agent systems has been proposed. The suggested tool will assist healthcare practitioners to manage beds in the hospitals and also to address the problem of bed management by offering a referral depending on availability of beds to avoid tension in hospitals.

Keywords: multi-agent system; MAS; decision support system; bed management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMS.2018.089954

International Journal of Applied Management Science, 2018 Vol.10 No.1, pp.59 - 71

Received: 26 Jan 2017
Accepted: 01 Mar 2017
Published online: 26 Feb 2018 *

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