| Scheduling and Task Structures |
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| Before introducing a method for designing negotiation protocols for appointment scheduling, some specifics of the domain will be described. Appointment scheduling is basically the assignment of tasks to dates. In hospitals there is a huge amount of negotiations for fixing such appointments when treatments or examinations should be executed. However there are many constraints that make the appointment of a date rather sophisticated: |
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| Treatment or examinations are tasks that mostly have to be done with a present patient. This leads often to an associated transportation problem. Single tasks are normally parts of a treatment plan which is specific for one patient. Due to the state of health of the patient or to task specific requirements the resulting schedule has to satisfy several temporal restrictions. Examples are predefined sequences of execution (remove plaster cast before x-ray) and necessary delays between investigations and other tasks (e.g. no meal before gastroscopy). |
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| Not only the amount of constraints for appointment scheduling makes it a complicated task, the organizational structure makes worse. Many of treatments of examinations are performed by different organizational entities that autonomously manage their time plans. Additionally, the execution of tasks often requires the work of several agents, e.g. medical personnel. The involved agents (from different organizational entities) negotiate and agree upon appointments; every agent considers his own restrictions and preferences and integrates the appointment into a special time table for ward or functional unit. |
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| Requirements for a Language for Appointment Scheduling |
| The basis for negotiation forms a language that can be used for specifying the proposals that negotiation is about. We derive some requirements for a language that is expressive enough for specifying negotiations about appointments in the context sketched in the last section. |
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| General Requirements |
| Intuitivity: The language should be derived from human communication and intuitively understandable. Reproduction of negotiations by simulated agents is facilitated, as well as the implementation of negotiating software agents by a human programmer. In hybrid organizations negotiations performed in a human centered way which may improve human-agent interaction. |
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| Consistency: The protocols of the sending and the receiving agent have to be consistent without deadlocks, lifelocks or undefined reactions. Each speech act triggers a corresponding well defined reaction. |
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| Extensibility: In complex scenarios it is necessary to construct and validate them iteratively. Thus negotiation protocols and content language should be extensible. |
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| Separation of protocol structures and reasoning elements: A separation of invariant protocol structures from variant strategic reasoning elements is an important requirement for specifying different strategies in an efficient way. |
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| Scenario-Specific Requirements |
| Ability to express priorities and preferences: An agent may use priorities in its private reasoning process. As a consequence the agents must be able to talk about task or date priorities. Related to this, the language should provide a mean to communicate about preferred time and task assignments. |
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| Ability to Reserve fixed dates: In real-world scenarios sometimes a short-time reservation precedes the actual appointment. |
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| Expressability of Uncertainties: If the duration to task performance is not fixed, appointments with estimated durations might be necessary. Another source of uncertainty may be a probability for cancellation. These requirements may have to be extended when more sophisticated scenarios are tackled. But as we focus on developing negotiation protocols, a reasonable, but not a complete language is sufficient for our aim. |
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| Categories of Negotiation Contents |
| Depending on the domain further stories can be found. In the hospital domain one can identify the following three negotiation cases that form categories for episodic stories. |
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| New Appointment: The example story depicted above belongs to this category. It contains all stories in that appointments for previously unscheduled tasks are made. The basic new appointment negotiation can be extended in various directions: Service demanders may temporally reserve dates and go on negotiating about subsequent tasks; agents may interrupt the negotiation process for modifying appointments with other agents. |
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| Modification of an existing appointment: Due to the dynamics of the hospital domain a need for changing an already fixed appointment may emerge. |
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| Cancellation of an appointment: Unexpected events may make existing plans and appointments obsolete. On the side of a functional unit this may be caused by a breakdown of a machine or the arrival of an emergency. A change in the patients' state of health may also result in the cancellation of an appointment. |
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| Intelligent Agent and Multi-Agent Systems in BusinessFor each of the three negotiation cases a general negotiation protocol can be defined based on analyzing the relevant stories.Before describing the protocols and their representations in more detail, the next section clarifies the atomic primitives of a protocol, namely the speech acts. |
| Primary provider notification report |
| Hospital use reports show admissions, discharges and average length of stay |
| Automatic logging of appointments for an instant, permanent audit trail |
| Missed appointment reports and mailers |
