Using Agents to Build a Practical Implementation of the INCA (Intelligent Community Alarm) System Martin Beer
Iain Anderson
Wei Huang
Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZF. United Kingdom.
Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZF. United Kingdom.
Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZF. United Kingdom.
[email protected]
[email protected] to a wide range of existing databases, knowledge bases and control systems that are already in place. The much broader care picture can thus be developed, and is of great help to care managers in developing the most e ective and eÆcient care programme for each individual, including the elimination of unnecessary duplication of resources. The need to provide the most appropriate assistance in reasonable time has to be a signi cant focus of the research. This requires a multi-dimensional negotiation at a number of levels if acceptable levels of service are to be assured. The provision of care inevitably requires a considerable degree of co-operative activity between individuals and agencies. Each actor has to interface with a number of di erent systems and organizational structures, each of which will have its own concept base (or Ontology) (Jones et al. (1999)).
ABSTRACT This paper describes an agent system to demonstrate the practicality of the INCA (Intelligent Community Support for the Elderly) architecture. This architecture is intended to integrate a number of autonomous systems; home monitoring, community alarms, care management systems and emergency systems command and control systems using agent technology to build e ective coordinated care systems. A range of di erent autonomous bodies provides such care, many of which have their own management information systems already in place. Since these systems do not only contain information relevant to community care, but also all the other activities of the agent, that it would be unwilling to make available to other parties, the actual management of community care has remained primarily outside the role of current systems. The current demonstrator has been built using the ZEUS agent-building toolkit (Nwana et al (1999)) as the basis for the development of a 'bench-top' demonstrator to show that the INCA architecture is both scalable to realistic activity levels and integrates fully and e ectively with existing computer systems in the various agencies involved, without loss of autonomy and security.
2. CONSTRUCTING THE DEMONSTRATOR The following task agents can be found within the INCA demonstrator. CARE CO-ORDINATOR: This agent represents the agent responsible for the overall provision of care. The care co-ordinator formulates the Individual care plan on which care provision is based and is also charged with monitoring the e ectiveness of the care provided.
Keywords practical applications of agents, coordinating multiple agents, integration and coordination of multiple activities, organisation of agent societies
1.
CARE PROVIDER: This agent represents the generic form of the various actors or agencies that supplies the health care resources and services as speci ed within an older person's Individual care plan.
INTRODUCTION
The integration with existing care systems makes this approach very di erent from other proposals in the area, since the INCA system (Beer et al (1999)) can interface directly
INFORMAL CARER: This agent represents the friends and family of the older persons within the health care system, thus giving the informal carers a formal means of representation within the INCA domain. The Informal carer can supply health care resources under the exible term 'Support'.
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OLDER PERSON: This agent represents the older person who receives and consumes the health care services and resources. 106
The provision of care is within the `real-world' environment, is normally supplied by a number of di erent independent `Care Providers'. To design the INCA demonstrator with just one care provider seemed a little limiting. Therefore three additional 'Care provider' agents were also envisaged. The agent known as `CARE PROVIDER' was taken to characterise a generic care provider that could represent any health care organisation responsible for supplying care. The three additional care provider agents were as follows: EMERGENCY SERVICES: This agent represents the ambulance, police and re services and is responsible for the provision of care as required during an emergency situation.
Figure 1: The Full Architecture of the INCA Prototype
DOCTOR: This agent represents a G.P or more generally any generic 'Doctor' envisaged role.
expanding number of health care actors and organisations is a matter for future work. The use of agent technology within INCA provides the means by which an individually taylored service can be provided to elderly people that meets their current needs. It is possible for such a system to interact e ectively without the various independent agencies loosing autonomy. This is important, as each has a much wider range of responsibilities than just those assigned through INCA. There vis also the issue of con dentiality. The wrapper approach adopted within INCA allows both these issues to be addressed highly e ectively, and allows existing control and scheduling systems to deal with speci c operational constraints. The system will therefore be robust to changes in legislation and working practices and will automatically incorporate enhancements introduced by the various agencies within their domains. This is important if trust in the system is to be maintained.
NURSE: This agent represents a distinct nurse or any other generic nurse role. The interactions required for each of the task agents were thn de ned in the form of Use-Cases. These encapsulate the communication requirements between each of the agents participating in the INCA prototype.
3.
RESULTS
The major advance for the INCA project was the implementation of the agent negotiation component of the INCA demonstrator, in which the collaborative agents within the architecture co-operated in order to accomplish the goal of the provision of health care services/resources (whether routine or emergency). This demonstrated that the utilisation of agent-based technologies could be undertaken in order to achieve distributed demand and supply issues within a integrated domain space, whilst keeping the actors and agencies (within the domain) as independent and autonomous as possible. As implemented, there are di erences from the approach described in Beer et al (1999). These were made to allow implementation within the resources available for the initial implementation and to make the best use of the facilities provided by the Zeus toolkit. Now that a successful prototype is available and running, it is possible to develop it further by providing the additional agents required. The successful implementation of the data wrapper approach to the integration of an external data source (in this case, the Access database), with the INCA agent architecture provides valuable support for the INCA projects integration programme. The demonstrator showed that it is possible to integrate data sources as part of an overall agent system, data sources such as those associated with the various health care organisations incorporated within the INCA domain.
4.
5. BIBLIOGRAPHY
CONCLUSIONS
The INCA demonstrator successfully showed that the INCA agent architecture is a feasible proposition within the limited scope of a small-scale system based on the methodologies of ZEUS agent development toolkit. Whether the agent architecture in question can be scaled to develop a robust, industrial sized agent system as would be required to integrate the 107
Beer, M. D., Bench-Capon, T., & Sixsmith, A. `The Delivery of E ective Integrated Community Care with the aid of Agents", Proceedings of ICSC'99, Hong Kong, December 1999. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1749, SpringerVerlag pp303-398) Gray, P.M.D., A. Preece, N.J. Fiddian, W.A. Gray, T.J.M. Bench-Capon, M.J.R. Shave, Azarmi, N., Wiegand, M., Ashwell, M., Beer, M. D., Cui, Z., Diaz, B., Embury, S. M., Hui, K., Jones, A. C., Jones, D. M., Kemp, G. J. L., Lawson, E. W., Lunn, K., Marti, P., Shao, J., and Visser, P. R. S., (1997). `KRAFT: Knowledge Fusion from Distributed Databases and Knowledge Bases' Database and Expert System Applications (DEXA'97), Toulouse, France Jones, D. M., Bench-Capon, T.J.M., Vissar, P.R.S., Diaz, B., Beer, M. D. & Shave, M.J.R., `Resolving Ontological Heterogeneity in the KRAFT Project', Proceedings of Dexa'99, Florence, Italy, August 1999 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1677, Springer-Verlag pp668-677) Nwana, H., Ndumu, D., Lee, L., and Collis, J., (1999) `ZEUS: A Tool-Kit for Building Distributed Multi-Agent Systems', Applied Arti cal Intelligence Journal, Vol 13, Number 1. Shave, M. J. R., (1997). `Ontological Structures for Knowledge Sharing', New Review of Information Networking, Vol 3, pp.125-133.
