Coordinating patient preferences through automated negotiation: A multiagent systems model for diagnostic services scheduling

This paper presents a multiagent systems model for patient diagnostic services scheduling. We assume a decentralized environment in which patients are modeled as self-interested agents who behave strategically to advance their own benefits rather than the system wide performance. The objective is to improve the utilization
of diagnostic imaging resources by coordinating patient individual preferences through automated negotiation. The negotiation process consists of two stages, namely patient selection and preference scheduling. The contractnet protocol and simulated annealing based meta-heuristics are used to design negotiation protocols at the two
stages respectively. In terms of game theoretic properties, we show that the proposed protocols are individually rational and incentive compatible. The performance of the preference scheduling protocol is evaluated by a computational study. The average percentage gap analysis of various configurations of the protocol shows that
the results obtained from the protocol are close to the optimal ones. In addition, we present the algorithmic properties of the preference scheduling protocol through the validation of a set of eight hypotheses.