Date of Award

2017

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.Sc.

Department

Computer Science

Keywords

Agent capabilities, Multi-Agent System, Palliativecare, Social network, Task allocation

Supervisor

Kobti, Ziad

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

A social health care system, such as palliative care, can be viewed as a social network of interacting patients and care providers. Each patient in the network has a set of capabilities to perform his or her intended daily tasks. However, some patients may not have the required capabilities to carry out their desired tasks. Consequently, different groups of care providers - consist of doctors, volunteers, nurses, etc.- offer the patients support by providing them with a variety of needed services. Assuming there are a cost and resource limitations for providing care within the system, where each care provider can support a limited number of patients, the problem is to find a set of suitable care providers to match the needs of the maximum number of patients. In this dissertation, we propose a novel agent-based model to address this problem by extending the agent's capabilities using the benefit of the social network. Our assumption is that each agent, or patient, can cover its disabilities and perform its desired tasks through collaboration with other agents, or care providers, in the network. The goal of this work is to improve the quality of services in the network at both individual and system levels. On the one hand, an individual patient wants to maximize the quality of his/her life, while at the system level we want to achieve quality care for as many patients as possible with minimum cost. The performance and functionality of this proposed model have been evaluated based on various synthetic networks. The results demonstrate a significant reduction in the operational costs and enhancement of the service quality.

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