Continual planning and scheduling for managing patient tests in hospital laboratories

Hospital laboratories perform examination tests upon patients, in order to assist medical diagnosis or therapy progress. Planning and scheduling patie nt requests for examination tests is a complicated problem because it conce rns both minimization of patient stay in hospital and maximization of labor atory resources utilization. In the present paper, we propose an integrated patient-wise planning and scheduling system which supports the dynamic and continual nature of the problem. The proposed combination of multiagent an d blackboard architecture allows the dynamic creation of agents that share a set of knowledge sources and a knowledge base to service patient test req uests. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.