Formal describing the organizations in the pervasive healthcare information system: Multi-agent system perspective

Abstract

With the development of computing technology, the architecture of healthcare information systems (HIS) may evolve into an application of pervasive computing. HIS requires a more complex high-level design because of its involvement of many different organizations with individual interests and goals. Therefore, an agent-oriented architecture is preferable over other traditional models, such as object-oriented and service-oriented architectures. Through expanding the temporal logic with deontic logic, a novel formal model for agent organization in a multi-agent system is addressed. This new formal description method is more flexible and robust for describing the complex behavior of agent organization, and this, it can be applied to the pervasive HIS and improve its capability for high-level design and description. Recently, remote and pervasive healthcare information systems have become more popular with the development of cloud computing, the internet, and multi-agent systems. HIS is much more complex than many information systems. Therefore, the formal description of a pervasive HIS based on a multi-agent system appears very difficult. A novel description of an agent organization cannot solve all of the problems of designing a pervasive HIS, but it can improve its capability of high-level design over traditional agent models.